I have finished Splosion Man. I saw the ending credit sequence and laughed a few times. Their were times when playing the game I was really digging it's vibe and controls. So why is it that I feel a deep seeded hatred for the game's level designer?

Now before I go more in depth to this little bit of melodrama I'd like to give you all some context on my perspective on games. I've been gaming since the early nineties, since before I was old enough to be able to beat 1-1 of Super Mario Brothers.

Back in my heyday I played just as many games as any other youngun with an obsession and a weekly rental at the local video hut. The trick is while many other kids beat games. I restarted them when they started pissing me off. Later in the SNES days I began using game genie very frequently.

Games back in the good old days were often mind numbingly hard affairs and I was always of the opinion that I'd rather experience all of a game but the challenge then experience half of a game with it. It would be no surprise to anyone that I consider the fact that games are easier these days to be a blessing.

I game for experience. I can tolerate a challenge to an extent but I don't want a game JUST for that.

Now when I heard about splosion man it was always praise. It's funny, great controls. Then out of the corner of someones mouth they would mutter 'itsalittlehard' and move on. So when one of my friends bought it I said 'hey why not. It's got coop so I can play with my friend and I've cut my 'kind of hard' platforming teeth on N.

Good ever loving LORD I wonder why people didn't warn me.

As I was rocketing through the first ten levels or so I kind of got a groove going on. Dug the controls, loved the vibe. Then it happened.

The game hit me with a Sonic moment. Sonic moments are defined in my little 'mean nicknames for things I hate in games' mind as a moment where the game pushes you forward and encourages you to be reckless and keep up your pace, and then in the span of as little as half a second, presents you with a situation that will kill you if you continue going as you were previously.

In theory I'm sure that many game designers consider this a way of 'keeping the player on their toes'. In my world all it means is I never can get through the level on the first try or if I've slept since I last played it. I cannot react to these traps fast enough to dodge them if I haven't memorized the level before hand. This immediately threw up a red flag.

The game was punishing me for having not played it before.

Then the timed challenges began. Little chunks of game where you have to do tasks under the constant time pressure of impending death. Water was rising or spikes were pushing in or a robot was chasing you! Don't dawdle now! In a normal, reasonable game the challenges that are timed are usually easier then the ones that aren't.  This allows you some room for error so that you aren't dieing constantly.

In this game they seemed to make everything harder for when you were under the gun. The end result is numerous challenges where their was exactly zero room for error. Soon I was being trained like a circus chimp rather then playing a game.

I was no longer finding my way through a level I was playing a game of Simon says and Simon had a gun to my head. My only solace was a head shaking, dead eyed mantra of 'this is so bad' and the knowledge that eventually I was bound to get lucky and see the rest of the damn game.

Later in the game it seemed like the 'this is so bad' got more frequent and the challenges became worse. I was then introduced to 'the way of the coward.'. When you die a certain amount of times the game basically tells you that you should skip this level...while calling you a punk for doing so.

The game was officially insulting me because it was uncompromisingly hard. I had to throw a few curse words at the screen under my breath at this. I would never use this option, I decided, because I knew it was a placebo and was negative reinforcement at it's worst.

The game was trying to make me afraid of it. What use does skipping a level do to you when every level makes me die so much I get told 'you should skip this level' and I can only skip one and then beat another. Besides, if I was going to complain about this game on the Internet I should at least be polite enough to have played all of it.

I died over and over, experiencing frustration at the same level as those bastard bladed climbing sections in hell in the original God of War time and time again.

I was punishing myself for the sake of morbid curiosity of how far this game would abuse it's checkpoint system as an excuse to insult and infuriate me, (It's not bad game design for something to be hard if you can just try it again really quick right? Huhuhuh.) I found myself being slowly reminded of something...that's when I realized. I was playing a damn ROM hack.

watch and be horrified....and amused: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r86NLwCYXfk

That's exactly the design philosophy this game communicates to me. If the person making the game can beat it anyone who can't just isn't doing it right. If that wasn't it's intention then it is miscommunicating.

Thus you have a game where many of the challenges only have one way of winning and you spend more time trying to figure out what the level designer was thinking with the jump timing in a section then you do on the actual game.

Granted the frequent checkpoints make this game more winnable then a ROM hack and some of the levels are playable but no one can sit here and tell me this game was balanced with you winning the missions close to the par time without memorization in mind.

I am of the opinion that regardless of if a certain type of player likes this kind of punishment or not, this game being this hard is a design flaw. In my opinion a player has the right when he buys a game to choose where and when he is challenged on this level because this sort of 'put up or shut up' memorization and trial and error based game design is a flawed experience.

Permit me to demonstrate with a puzzle, mimicking the negative reinforcement style of splosion man. Feel free to put a time limit on yourself like the game does by minimizing the window every second and 'starting over' if you don't get it right the first time.

__________
[Q                  ]
[                     ]
[                     ]
[________Q]

Now try to click the X inside the rectangle. If you think you have it, or your a damn wuss who doesn't want to play because you ain't hardcore, scroll down.

You damn wuss

Turns out that the rectangle I was talking about was your computer screen. HAR HAR you should have clicked the X in the sentence telling you what to do! I owned you with my mad game design skillz.

Now I would dare say the above game was really piss poor and not fun. Firstly it thinks it's clever, when making something difficult is easy because all you have to do is not give the player the information they need to succeed.

Secondly while it has a solution in mind, it doesn't take into account other, also valid, solutions that would lead to the player failing despite having the right idea, such as if they clicked the X to close their browser window. Thirdly, adding a time limit of a second onto it wouldn't be fun because there is no way someone is solving what to do in a second.

So all you are doing is making them tread water and think under pressure in second bursts instead of giving them enough time to parse out the solution for all the seconds they are going to spend thinking on it while you constantly fail them anyway.

Also the time pressure itself makes executing the task excessively hard even if they know what to do if they had their mouse too far away to scroll and accurately click an X in such a short period of time.

Not to mention the more times you insult the player and fail them the more frustrated they get and frustration hampers reasoning skills and fine motor functions so you are making it even harder by being a dick about it.

Splosion man is like that at times. It tries to be clever but it's cleverness is hampered because everything it's doing is so damn frustrating that it becomes tedious. So by the time you have actually finished the task you are too busy feeling like crap because it was such an ordeal to even feel accomplishment.

I personally would have rather had a game where your first time through you would maybe die...like 4-7 times per level if you didn't know what you were doing and had crap reaction times.

Then replaying the level you could focus on making a few adjustments, then hammering out a wicked fast time in time trial mode to give yourself a challenge and feel like you are mastering the mechanics.

Instead you have a first play through of the game where you can die 20 to 40 times on the same damn section and by the time you are finished you never want to play it again so you'll never want to improve at it. I would have liked to be able to choose my level of challenge for the game instead of the challenge being forced on me so aggressively.

In short, the game has great controls (except for pulling yourself up from hanging on a ledge, which is far too slow) and a great sense of humor, but is constantly a chore for anyone but masochistic gamers who pine for the days when everyone else was cheating to see the ending of games.

On my personal scale of saying one word that sums up my feelings for the game, I give it a "maddening"