Shooting Games #2
Another pair of good and bad points about everybody's favorite thing in the world, shooting games.
Good point - Exciting set-pieces
The more ludicrous and over-the-top, the better. Modern Warfare 2 is great for these. There's a bit where you jump over a ravine on a snowmobile whilst firing a pistol. There's a bit where you fight through the White House, while it's on fire, after it's been hit by a nuke. There's a bit where you pull a knife out of your own chest and throw it into the evil bad man.
It's all very exciting, and it's something that suits the first person perspective perfectly. All the big shooters should be full of set-pieces that make over-excited teenagers punch the air and shout 'FUCK YEAH' whilst choking on their Mountain Dew.
Bad point - The screen going more red the closer you are to death.
Good grief this is annoying. More so now that it has graduated from shooting games to every single bloody game ever. I admit that health bars are not the most attractive thing to have on your screen, but at least they only take up a small part of the screen and don't obscure the whole damn game.
I kind of get the idea behind the whole screen-reddening, close-to-death-blurred-vision thing, but it's just no fun. At all. It makes dying way more frustrating than it already is by making it so that when you actually die you don't have a clue what killed you because you couldn't see shit through the massive red filter.
The world would be a better place if everyone just forgot this particular mechanic existed. Was it really so bad looking at health bars?
