What's your game?

Difficulty level and SSX3, Simpsons: Hit & Run, and the Quiddich game

To celebrate shipping the last of the pages for our special issue on Friday, I’ve spent the majority of this weekend on my ass in front of a TV playing games. I intended to spend some time playing Call of Duty, but my gaming PC had a freak-out, and I just got it back up and running a few minutes ago.

First up is SSX3. I hadn’t really taken the time to play it, since I want Gina and I to progress at about the same rate. Nothing’s less fun than a multiplayer game that one person schools you at every single time. I finally sat down and unlocked enough of the game to gain access to the second peak of the mountain, and I think that I’ve got enough time in to accurately judge it now.

The game is a masterpiece of game design. I expect to see this game win a shitload of awards at GDC next year, it’s technically innovative while maintaining perfect gameflow. Best of all, it’s easy enough that you feel like you’re always progressing, but there’s still loads of stuff to do for the hardcore gamer who wants to unlock everything.

It works like this. Unlike earlier versions of SSX where you unlocked individual courses one-by-one, in SSX3, there are only three regions to be unlocked. These are represented as three different peaks of the same mountain. Transitions from one peak to the next are absolutely seamless. You can board from the top of the highest peak on the mountain to the bottom of the lowest peak without a single load screen (there are loading screens when you go back up to the top of a slope though). On each peak there are several junction points, where free riders can either board directly into the next event, or do a free ride down a particular section of the course.

While you board, you listen to a “Radio BIG,” one of two different ‘radio stations’ you can choose to tune into while you race down the mountain. Between songs, the DJ keeps you informed about happenings around the mountain, including what you’ve been up to, what other competitors are doing, down to what the weather is going to be like on different tracks. The effect completely sucks you into the game, and gives the player the feeling that stuff is actually on the rest of the mountain while you try different challenges and races.

That’s enough SSX 3 for now. I’ll talk more about it later, don’t worry :)

I also put a few hours into Simpsons: Hit & Run, which is nothing more than a Grand Theft Auto clone without the machine guns. If you’re not familiar with GTA, the point of the game is to drive around interesting, dynamic areas and do ‘stuff’. ‘Stuff’ can range from destroying another car, collecting a bunch of one type of object, racing someone, or a combination of the three. There’s not a lot of variety in mission-type, but the environments are big enough to keep it ineteresting, especially for a Simpsons fan.

The problem is difficulty level. The initial levels of the game were a complete cakewalk. I unlocked through mission five (of seven) in about 2 hours, without playing many of the side missions or bonus missions. However, midway through mission five, the game suddenly becomes MUCH more difficult. When I say much more difficult, I mean try the same section of a mission twenty times before you successfully complete it. Once I got past the three missions at the end of level five, it went back to cakewalk mode again. It’s quite odd.

Speaking of a cakewalk, Harry Potter: Quiddich World Cup is an astoundingly easy game. I’ve read all the Harry Potter books, so I had a pretty good idea how Quiddich worked before I started playing the game, but it’s insanely easy. ‘NHL 1993 for Sega Genesis once you learned how to shoot one timers’ easy. It’s really that easy, even on the harder skill levels.

The problem is inherent with the rules of the (fictional) wizarding game. Here’s the quick version: there are three hoops at either end of the field. Tossing one ball (the quaffle) through one of those is worth 10 points. At some point, another ball, called the golden snitch, will make its appearance. Catching that (a job so important a player is dedicated to looking for it the entire game) nets you 150 points. The problem with the game is that the snitch always appears about the time the 160th point is scored in the game, rendering all the bits with the quaffle and the rest of the game pointless. Well, unless you’re unable to score a single quaffle goal during the match that is. You end up farting around for five or ten minutes trying to get the total combined score to 160, then make absolutely sure you nab the snitch and your guaranteed a win.

It’s not quite that simple, the team in the lead has a better chance of getting the snitch since they start out closer but that’s a minor inconvenience for a skilled player. In order for the game to be fun, and the outcome not entirely dependent on catching the snitch, the game should wait to spawn the snitch until 250 or so points have been scored total. It would have also added more strategy to the game if your seeker (the person who looks for and catches the snitch) could knock the opposing seeker off the trail of the snitch, if you were more than 150 points behind.

My feeling is that the game is intentionally too easy though, to make it accessible to a much younger crowd than most videogames.