Weird Science and Videogames

I've read this article a couple of times, and I'm still not sure what it means...

Also, recently I've been playing a good deal of Spartan: Total Warrior for Xbox. Overall, it's a pretty sweet button mashing hack and slash. The controls are intuitive, the violence is bloody, and the soundtrack blends techno and epic music without feeling contrived.

Suffer the wrath of my Socratic irony!

Granted, a lot is really going to have to go wrong before I refuse to play a game that allows me to battle my way through hundreds of years of history and myth (sure Beowulf doesn't belong here, but that dosen't make fighting him any less cool) as a badass Spartan warrior, but the game suffers from several major design flaws. A few of these are game specific, but the rest represent things that I can't stand in any videogame.

1. Objectives involving protecting NPC's or objects- This has been a staple of videogames for years, and it really needs to be discontinued until either AI gets exponentially smarter or game designers find a way to make it not suck. Nothing frustrates me more than fighting off a legion of enemies only to have the protectee walk casually into some hazard and force me to redo the mission. In the case of Spartan- forcing me to protect multiple grainstores from hordes of barbarian warriors just sucks the fun out of gaming. The physics of existence require me to be in one place at one time, and asking me to violate this just makes me angry, especially when my cadre of allies can't recognize enemies across certain invisible, arbitrary boundaries.
   
2. Poor AI in general- Sure, the first time I knocked over a flaming brazier and knocked some Romans into it was sweet. However, this was tempered against discovering that I could quickly dispatch of fifty enemies by running from one side of the fire to the other, while the mongloid soldiers chased me directly through the flames, killing themselves. I'm all for being able to use the environment to your advantage, but a central tenet of this is NPC's should also be dynamic enough to recognize obvious traps and dangers.
3. Arbitrary boundaries- if the game has to be linear, then don't go through the trouble of animating extra space protected by invisible walls. Only make the level as big as what can be used. I can't remember exactly what game it was, but in one WWII game I remember having to fight my way down a narrow street protected by multiple machine gun nests, when all I wanted to do was run around the barn and flank, but couldn't because of a two foot high fence. I recently took a poll of WWII veterans and imagine my surprise when 100% of them responded that they would rather climb a fence than walk straight into machine gun crossfire.
   
4. Poorly designed checkpoints- remember playing Halo and getting a checkpoint with one bar of health right before having to fight four platinum elites? It sucked. Now imagine that, only without the option to restart the level and with the checkpoints placed at larger breaks in action. If I just had to massacre two hundred Romans in a courtyard before running off to the other side of the city in a cut scene, it isn't ridiculous to ask that my health should be refilled before jumping into action again. Especially when numerous archers have the option to pick me off before I can engage them. On a semi-related note, don't animate cut scenes for frequent tasks like opening chests if I'm immobilized during the scene and my enemies aren't. A quick example would be me standing immobilized in front of a chest waiting for it to open, while the Hydra gets a free chomp. If it has to take me time to do it and it's crucial that everyone else still be able to move, then don't put it in a cut scene and give me the option to cut the action short if need be.
   
5. Recipe bosses- I can't stand fighting a boss and having him instantly kill you multiple times before you learn the pattern and then easily dispatch him without taking any damage. This almost makes me wish for turn based combat, but not really...