Things That Need to Stop Happening in Videogames: Vol. 1

It's no secret, I enjoy the occasional round of videogame playing. To be more specific, videogames are as much a part of my life as food, my family, and hating the mailman. So, one can tell that it is not with an inexperienced mind that I write this: lots of stupid stuff happens in videogames. Most of this is balanced by all the glorious things that happen, like chainsawing someone in half in Gears of War, to making someone a headless quadruple amputee using only twelve bullets in Soldier of Fortune. Yes, I find a majority of the glory in videogames comes from murdering fools as brilliantly and bloodily as possible.
Unfortunately, there are a handful of things that occur in videogames that sully their reputation. They occur often enough to be among the most annoying things ever to be birthed by a sentient being. Luckily, I'm here to drag them out from gaming's seedy underbelly into the harsh light of hatred and disgust.

Number one: Stupid quicktime events.
(For the uneducated masses: quicktime events are unskippable sequences in videogames that, when done properly, somewhat mirror what the character is doing onscreen, and usually require that the player execute them correctly, or suffer one of many horrible deaths. A button or direction will appear onscreen, and the player is required to press the correct button / direction in a set--incredibly short--amount of time, if they want to avoid the aforementioned death. A common quicktime event has the player combating some sort of enemy, or traversing some form of dangerous locale, pressing the correct button as quickly as possible to make the character jump across the gap, stab the enemy, outrun the boulder, not get eviscerated by the zombie, etc.)
Now, don't get me wrong. I'm normally a fan of quicktime events. If they are done properly. Now, you might be thinking "Aden, you dashing young comedic and intellectual goldmine! Quicktime events are super awesome! God of War proved this!" There, you'd be sort of right, and sort of wrong. But mostly wrong, because you'd be disagreeing with me. God of War didn't so much prove the awesomeness of quicktime events as it showcased the fuck out of them; requiring them to be used if the player's desire is to completely kill any enemy larger than an anorexic soldier. It sort of felt like the developers were saying "Holy fucking shit! Aren't these things awesome?!?!" And so decided to throw them in willy-nilly throughout the game. Some of them were done decently; the button pressed corresponded roughly to what was happening onscreen. These are known as "Good" quicktime events. "Good" quicktime events are featured prominently in Heavenly Sword. The player flicks the control stick to the right, the character moves / jumps to the right. The player hits the attack button, and the character tosses her blade-on-a-chain into a piece of scenery to create a cool swingy-thing, or into an enemy to create a corpse. I salute these sequences, as they make some degree of sense.
Unfortunately, many quicktime events fall into the "Bad" category. These include sequences like "Press the X button rapidly to run away from HOLY SHIT THERE'S A MOTHERFUCKING BOULDER BEHIND YOU!" This would be fine, except that up until this point, the X button has been used to interact with the environment; pick up items, open doors, etc. To me, this doesn't make much sense, and results in a lousy experience. A "good" game for witnessing "Bad" quicktime events? Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles. Players will be moving along, capping multitudes of zombies with casual presses of the B button, when suddenly something along the lines of "HOLY SHIT THAT GIANT SCORPION IS GONNA STAB YOU WITH ITS TAIL! PRESS B / SHAKE THE WIIMOTE AND NUNCHUK TO DODGE THAT SHIT!" will happen. I won't even get into the fact that if your only option is to shake the controller, you're basically fucked, as it is an unresponsive pile of feces. Nevertheless, my response is usually "What the fuck!? How will pulling the trigger or fucking DANCING save me from a case of Arachnid-in-the-guts!?" Note: "Dancing" is the only suitable real-life motion that I can picture being emulated by shaking the wiimote and nunchuk.
The mention of these quicktime events leads me into the next category: Quicktime events that fall under the category of "HOLY SHIT! PRESS THIS BUTTON TO NOT DIE!" These are steaming piles of horseshit. No questions asked. Anything that suddenly appears, without warning, and suddenly tasks you with hitting a button to save your life is just idiotic. What's even worse is that many of these crop up during cutscenes; sequences where I usually drop the controller in favour of a refreshing beverage or a sandwich or something. What's even worse than THAT is when these retarded scenes don't let you simply try again when you fail. Many of them will do that, but there are a select few that reanimate your horribly crushed / burned / stabbed / eaten corpse back at the last checkpoint, which might very well be fifteen minutes of gameplay.
To put it simply, quicktime events need to either universally be well done, or just stop existing. Simple as that.

Number two: "Horror" in a game that is entirely of the "Thing jumps out of nowhere and yells BOO" variety. To paraphrase: More atmosphere, fuckers! I'm not saying that "cheap scares" need to be entirely removed from videogames. Rather, they should--sometimes--be the "payoff" from the building up of incredibly creepy atmosphere. Games like Silent Hill scare you much more with what happens offscreen--the creaking of rusty hinges, the thumping of footsteps somewhere close by--than with any of the creepy-crawlies that shamble into your flashlight's glare. Sure, there are some cheap "BOO, MOTHERFUCKER!" scares peppered about here and there, but those aren't the only things being relied upon. Another shining example is found in Fort Frolic, of Bioshock. (Keep in mind that Bioshock is not entirely a horror game, and does not have tons of scares in it, but it does set a very motherfucking creepy atmosphere, at times.) So, you're walking along in Fort Frolic, and you come across some of Sander Cohen's "creations": corpses dipped in plaster and posed in various positions--of course, I didn't realize they were corpses until I smacked one with my wrench and blood came out. Ick. So, it dawns on you that this dude is a motherfucking psychopath. Now, this wouldn't be so much creepy as just weird, except for one scene that, to this day, still sticks out in my mind. You enter a room, lit only by the glare of a television. Further, three figures are silhouetted on the couch. You move around to the side, and you bear witness to another of Cohen's creations: a woman, a man, and their child, eternally gazing at the TV together. This scene is almost perverse in its tender portrayal of a family simply spending a few moments together, in the ruined Utopia that is Rapture, the underwater city that is the setting of the game. However, the creepiest moment in this area has to be discovering one of the audio logs of Sander Cohen. It's a simple poem, entitled "The Wild Bunny":


Freaky shit, right? A note to game developers: More of this! No more monsters bursting out of doors / closets / ducts. It's old, it's stale. Bioshock managed to set a really motherfucking creepy atmosphere, and it's not even a fucking horror game! Fail, game developers. Fail.