Gaming Diary, Day 21

... or Day Whatever, because at this point I realized I had to make an error with the day numbers at some point. But let's pretend everything's fine and dandy.

I installed C&C3: Tiberium Wars yesterday, and instantly remembered all I loved the game for. The great cut scenes, fun gameplay and terrific graphics made this RTS an instant winner with me. I can't really remember why I haven't finished it the first time around, but I'm pretty determined to fix that now.

Also, today, Dead Space has finally made me remove it from the hard drive. Not only after 5+ hours of gameplay I'm still stressed as hell and can barely take the atmosphere of it, the difficulty setting arbitrarily changed to Medium (from Easy) and the change was quite noticeable AND the stupid and unclear save labelling system made me delete my progress through a very tense 30 minutes or so of the game.

Now here's what I don't get in video games. Why the arbitrary save points? Why can't I just save whenever I feel like it? Sure, some of the tension may or may not be gone, but so is the frustration. I shit on the argument that Save points instead of a regular "Save wherever you want" system add to the suspense - if that's the way the game's authors see building atmosphere, then they should get back to creating a story which does the same, not rely on such an archaic (coming from old consoles) system...

So Dead Space is no more and I don't see myself installing it again any time soon. I left the saves in place, of course, just to not play through the whole hellish experience again. Maybe in a few years time, I'll grow out of being scared by crap like that and will know the plot (virtually the only thing that kept me playing until now, as the game itself isn't anything special - the atmosphere and story are the two things important about it, the rest is merely OK). I feel a bit guilty, but hey, it's not like I haven't played it at all.

My biggest gripe now is that the game Condemned: Criminal Origins is dirt cheap in a store in Poland and I'm planning to buy it. Now, it is said that it's also close to the horror genre and it's pretty scary, but I want to buy it anyway because of its good press. Thankfully, I'll do that no earlier than in December, because my schedule is still pretty tight and I won't have time for playing these games now. My absolutely wrecked nerves have enough to worry about with the, quite scary and atmospheric, Doom 3.