Review

Sometimes games can be so frustrating. I mean really frustrating. The ones that are frustrating aren't so because they're bad. If they were just bad games, I'd lament the hour or two that it took to figure that out, and move on. No, they're frustrating because there's something about them, something that makes your 'fun sense' tingle. Maybe it's completely obvious and identifiable, and you know darn well what it is because the game gives you little pieces of it. Or maybe it isn't obvious; rather the game makes you think abstractly about a concept that seems like it would be amazingly fun. Either way, the game you're actually playing, or just trying to play, isn't fun. It isn't fun because it's wrapped in the barbed wire of a terrible interface, or buried in a minefield of crippling bugs...

... or, in the case of Redguard, the game makes you do things that it just isn't any good at. Like jumping and melee fighting.

I tried to play through Redguard several times. Each time, I'd start playing, quickly suspect that this was one of the coolest games I'd ever played, and then shortly thereafter quit because I had to load a saved game 30 times just to get past a pointless jumping task. Note that I didn't say "jumping puzzle". There isn't anything puzzling about jumping. When I'm playing a game and I decide to jump, I know goddamned well what I want to do, how and when I want to jump. In Redguard, however, I had to wrestle with the interface to do it, like some mother dragging a tantrum-throwing 2-year-old through a grocery store. In fact, playing this game and Die By The Sword in parallel was enough to convince me that there's no such thing as a jumping "puzzle". When have you EVER legitimately needed logic to do an acrobatic feat? Gymnasts don't ever look quizzical when they're doing their routines. They look focused. They know how to control their bodies to execute the moves and they either exercise that control successfully or they don't. The handicap that avatar-based games have is that they must necessarily abstract the control that the player naturally has over their own body and map it through a mostly digital schema. There is a very thin line that such a game must walk, and deviating from that line just beckons frustration of some degree or another. A game developer is not ever going to be able to give the player 'natural' control over the avatar (not until we get neural links).

So if a developer is going to require that the player make the avatar do natural things, then they'd damn well better embrace the abstractions inherent in the process. In other words - as a player, I'm already stuck not controlling my avatar in a truly intuitive manner, so don't force me to do things that require intuitive control, or do things that require more precision than the interface provides. Most FPS game developers understand this. A perfect example is the fact that in a first-person shooter, when you run into a wall, you slide along it in a parallel fashion at a rate proportional to the angle of contact. I'll bet you just take that for granted. Another example is in any game that let's you mantle onto objects, such as Rune, or System Shock 2. Mantling is a complicated maneuver, and the designers were smart enough to realize that conventional FPS control schemes don't expose enough control of the avatar to let the player manually execute a mantling move. Nor would they necessary want to create an interface that could. What would be the point? Instead, it's implemented so that if you're facing an object that is mantleable and you jump, then you automatically mantle. Elementary and genius at the same time.

The other major thing that a developer needs to understand is that in an avatar-based real-time game, the most important thing is that the interface be highly responsive. Our brains will adapt to different control abstractions, but if they are sluggish, or sloppy, then frustration is almost unavoidable. This is really the root of Redguard's fatal flaw. The jumping and fighting aren't frustrating because of how you control the jumping and fighting, but because of the sluggishness and sloppiness with which Cyrus responds to those controls. Again, though, the problem arises from the combination of the interface and what the player is forced to do with the interface. This sloppiness wouldn't adversely affect Redguard in the least if the player weren't forced to do things that punished them for the sloppiness.

I'm making such a big deal of this interface issue because it is the one reason why I quit Redguard. I didn't quit because of a weak story, or because of poor NPC interaction, or bad inventory management, or inane adventure puzzles. I quit because I got fed up with trying to jump off of a ledge in just the right way that I'd land on some damn mushroom surrounded by acid and bounce off in the right direction. Now think about that description for a second and tell me what the hell business it has in an adventure game about political intrigue on a recently conquered island. Answer: none.

I desperately wanted to just play the promise of Redguard. The promise of Redguard was a non-linear, free form adventure game with an intriguing, multi-dimensional plot, presented with a gorgeous, dynamic 3D world. The promise was of an "epic story... that evolves at the pace of your play"; "involved puzzles, with multiple objects and deep combinations"; an "island of unparalleled scope and detail". Just looking at the game box again makes me want to give it another chance. But it's like that Simpson's episode where Lisa conducts her science project on Bart, connecting the cupcake to a battery. Bart keeps trying to pick it up because he wants the cupcake, and keeps getting shocked. That's me. I keep wanting to play Redguard, because I want what Redguard promised, but I keep getting zapped by the bad interface and unbecoming jumping chores.

To be fair, much of Redguard's promise was fulfilled. The progression is non-linear. The 3D world is gorgeous and dynamic. The character interaction is intelligent. But it's like someone promising you chocolate cake and then giving you chocolate cake covered in spoiled mayonnaise. Sure, there's chocolate cake underneath, but I'll be damned if I'm going to eat it.

I remembered a comment made by Tycho of Penny Arcade regarding the interface in the game Nocturne, by Terminal Reality:

"Developers, you will find that our Gabriel is not a patient man. He takes your poor control scheme and fun-house camera angles as calculated acts of personal aggression. Me, I'll let you get by on raw style just so long as this style of yours > some massive pain in my ass".

I think we all basically subscribe to Tycho's philosophy: we'll tolerate a pain in the ass for the sake of style, but only according to our own personal threshold. I guess the summary on Redguard is that it's pain in the ass crossed well beyond my threshold.

Marketing Lies

None, I guess, although obviously the single mention of "jumping" on the game box doesn't quite convey the degree to which it can shanghai the whole game.

Tips

• Enable auto-defend (press F7 to enable/disable). The collision detection on the sword fighting is too sloppy to take on its own terms. Just enable auto-defend, hold down the defend key, and look for methodical opportunities to counter attack.

• Pressing [ALT-F1] will take a screenshot.

• Note that the only graphics hardware acceleration available is Glide (for 3DFX cards).