License To Drive

I enjoy a variety of different games. Racing Sims, Arcade Racing, First Person Shooters, Third Person Shooters, Real Time Strat, Action Adventure, RPG adventure, Platformers, Side Scrollers… pretty much, if it’s a game, I enjoy it.

The thing with games is they tend to fit into one genre… for example there aren’t too many First Person Shooter/Racing Sims out there. Know what I mean?

The reason for this? If a game designer is going to focus on the game mechanics of a shooter, they spend all their development time and research time and programming time into working on that, which is good because if I’m playing a shooter I want it to me natural and work and make logical sense within the context of this game.

Why is it then, that so many games feel the need to put awkward driving (or flying) aspects into their game at all! Call of Duty 3, Lego Star Wars 2, and even Gears of War have segments where you are driving something in the campaign, when it is clear that things were not properly thought out.

Lego Star Wars is what drove me (ha pun!) to write this. The X-wing and Snowspeeder portions of the game were just terrible. The flight controls were just awful and the misiosn really knew how to take the fun out of the game. What happened?

This happens so often in games. I remember the ending of the first Halo… where you have to drive the Warthog out of the exploding well… Halo. Really, not so fun. It’s a shame when games that are so good get hung up on a segment that doesn’t fit into the game at all and throws off all the controls and strategy we had learned to love previously.

Leave the driving to the racing games please.