![\"psp_medalofhonorheroes2_box.jpg\"](\"http:\/\/www.gamingwithchildren.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/12\/psp_medalofhonorheroes2_box.thumbnail.jpg\")
So I have been trying to finish up the PSP game Medal of Honor Heroes 2 on the hardest difficulty level this weekend, and despite having finished it already on the lower difficulty level I am still having to grind my way through area after area due to an old fall-back of game design -‘die & retry’.<\/p>\n
‘Die & Retry’ is a situation where the developers don’t really expect you to live through the first time … or perhaps the first several. They set up a scenario where you will have to slowly uncover the secret to getting through an area by, well, dying repeatedly and having to keep retrying. This is done in pretty much every action-based genre – shooters, RPG’s, adventure games, and so on. But shooters are probably the worst – and console shooters the worst of the worst – because they combine gauntlet runs with enemies that appear from nowhere with limited ammo and quite often time limits.<\/p>\n
That is the scenario I faced – having to ‘escape’ the V2 rocket production facility I had just sabotaged. Once I press the button to open the first door a timer starts – and enemies start appearing. You take out some enemies and move to the next area to open another door, and then find that more enemies have impossibly appeared in the 8′ x 12′ sealed room where you hit the last switch. So you take them out while also dealing with other spawning enemies who can see where to shoot because of their mega-vision and never have to reload because of … oh, who am I kidding, at this point the game is just cheating wildly to make it exciting. And exciting it is, as you die after the second switch and reload so you can have another go, armed with some more knowledge. You make it to the third bunker this time, and then get picked off from a bridge that was empty before … and that you had crossed form another sealed area. Fine. Try again – and get a bit further, but in your caution you run out of time just as you see the final door raise.<\/p>\n
Eventually you will either give up the game forever or win – and crazy that I am I stuck it out WAY past when I planned to go to bed. This was a 10 minute section that took me nearly THREE HOURS of dying and retrying … and stopped being any fun after about thirty minutes. Setting up this scenario required violating many rules of reasonable game design:<\/p>\n
![\"psp_medalofhonorheroes2_b001jpg.jpg\"](\"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/12\/psp_medalofhonorheroes2_b001jpg.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
And on and on. The section sure was exciting, but in the desire to make a epic final battle the developers instead made a monument to crappy game design, and honored a tradition that really needs to die. Medal of Honor Heroes 2 is only a few hours long, but gets artificially doubled because of lousy checkpoints and loads of ‘die and retry’ scenarios. And it doesn’t stand out – loads of games do it, so when a refreshing game gives you actual challenges you are still blown away. Unfortunately that doesn’t happen much … especially with shooters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So I have been trying to finish up the PSP game Medal of Honor Heroes 2 on the hardest difficulty level this weekend, and despite having finished it already on the lower difficulty level I am still having to grind my way through area after area due to an old fall-back of game design -‘die […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=316"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}