The art of sadistic game design

This is to address what Activision’s Call of Duty dev team think is a good way to make a game “challenging”.

When it comes to games, I’ll admit that I’m a little full of myself in the sense that I always have to choose the highest difficulty setting as I can possibly manage. In CoD4, they give you the luxury of gauging just how long you’ll last on the battlefields they’ve created by going through a short target course which involves hitting a couple of cardboard cutouts of menacing terrorists within a certain time limit. Naturally, I had to fuck with the system and try it over and over again until I had beaten the record set by one of the other soldiers in the squad I was blessed with. After being promptly shot down for expecting that the game’s dev team would consider that someone would beat the record and incorporate some form of recognition on behalf of your captain for your amazing achievement on your first day as an SAS member, instead having my new record called “an improvement on garbage”, I went on to select my difficulty. As per the generous suggestion of the test’s result, I picked Veteran.

What the obstacle course neglects to do is emulate the targets’ abilities to see through walls, resurrect themselves, reload so fast it seems as though they never do it at all and, best of all, teleport on a whim. As a result, about 3 or 4 hours into the game – I don’t know for sure, all I know is that about half of them have been the most grueling and frustrating hours of my entire life – I am regretting that decision and wish to strangle little fluffy animals (which the game has already allowed me to do in quite a graphic manner) in order to vent my frustration.

Now I realise that there are people out there who found the game to be some form of cakewalk and are probably scoffing at the idea that I’m having a hard time beating it. But to them I give them the proverbial finger and tell them to fuck off because when a game’s difficulty is based solely on how long it takes for every single soldier I kill to be replaced with new ones, it tends to grind a little. I mean, fine – in the last stage you’d expect there to be at least a little resistance seeing as how you’re in their main headquarters, but for christ’s sake their numbers should start to thin down after a couple of hours of shooting them in the head. Not to mention how often it seems to occur whenever you manage to advance a little way and hide in a small boxed in area, there has to be that one bloody individual that respawns right behind you and forces you to repeat the whole ordeal for the n plus one‘th time. I can understand giving the enemy forces two functioning eyes with which to aim their gun perfectly at wherever you may decide to pop out of (more on that later) but I think we can all agree that when terrorists learn how to manipulate the fabric of space and time, things start to get a little unfair on the armed forces.

Going back to the topic of being in the middle of the enemy’s headquarters, you’d think that the issue of impending nuclear disaster would encourage at least one of the special forces teams involved with the mission to invest more manpower than three soldiers (two of which are only skilled in shooting the third member in the back, might I add) in order to get rid of the missiles. An alternate title for Call of Duty 4 could have just been “Soap McTavish vs. The world”, because that’s what it goddamn feels like most of the time.

There’s just so much for me to complain about, but at this point I’ve all but vented my pure rage the final level has instilled in me – and I’m still not finished with it either. I’ve already cheated once to get through one part of it (after having to cut through about 40 odd soldiers by myself before getting to the following checkpoint) but I doubt it’s going to be the last.