Thanks to Steam I regret buying games all the time. Years ago, when I had to travel to a store to buy a game, I occasionally had regrets as well, but I bought fewer games because stores never have sales, never have anything in stock, and Do you really want to be seen entering or leaving a computer game store? Steam solved all these problems. Of course, it also introduced new ones.
I regretted buying Left 4 Dead 2 after I learned it is not allowed to play without a microphone to scream into, and that if you try death squads will be sent to your house and your game will be sabotaged. Fortunately, in December 2010 (a much simpler time) the game was on sale, so I only spent 4.99 to shoot zombies with computer controlled idiots. I am not spending the minimum of 29.99 for a decent headset, or even 8.99 for a decent desktop microphone. I don't like to hear squeaky-voiced nerds and apathetic stoners when I play games. I don't like to get involved in defending girl-voiced game players from creeps. I just want to play a goddamn game and enjoy it for its own sake, with at most an optional social aspect. This is why I never played WoW, and also why Blizzard can suck it.
I bought Blue Shift, the Half-Life add-on, because it was cheap and I wanted to savor the nostalgia of the old Half-Life engine, which brought me so much fun when I was young. I regretted that purchase as soon as I entered a suicide elevator and had to check the internet to see how to progress further. You can search for Blue Shift + Suicide Elevator on Youtube and find out what I mean. It took 2 hours to beat, but was honestly worth the low, low price because I just wanted to hear the old sounds, see the old models, and die the old deaths while shooting the old guns.
I kind of regret buying Borderlands, but it was enjoyable enough for a while. It's just that the game has so little character or anything that I question playing it all. Will it make me bland? It doesn't help that Borderlands is also linear as hell but still makes you run around like a little cockroach – which is interesting, because it blends the worst aspects of linear and non-linear games, proving once and for all that the openness of a game does not really matter unless the game is generally superior anyway. It also has the worst, blandest, simplest, most annoying bosses since Dungeon Siege.
Then, this weekend, I had the ultimate temptation. Steam had 75% discounts on all Command and Conquer games (made since 2007 by EA, not Westwood [R.I.P]). Now the detail that they are all newer games is what made me question my urge to consume all of the games without thinking. Red Alert 3, when I researched it, had shitty animation, shiny graphics, and slick, soulless 3D nonsense. At 4.99 it might have been worth it.
But instead, I got Command and Conquer 3. Tiberium Wars. Sounds good, right? It looked marginally better than Red Alert 3, and I want to know how the series was doing in undeath (it ended sometime between 2003 and 2005). Well I've sobered up and thought about it and Fuck that stupid game. I regret it, and I regret being gullible enough to believe for a fatal minute that it would be enjoyable to play.
The cutscenes are for a dramatist to critique, and only serve to make the game more expensive to produce. The music is a steep let-down from what CnC used to offer. The interface is so hideous, bland, uninformative, finicky and featureless that I barely know how to repair or sell a structure. There are twice as many buttons as there need to be, none of them look like they do anything, and they're hard to see properly among all the action.
Oh there's the second point. The game is so busy with everything that you get the feeling it is holding your hand and pulling your leg at the same time. Even the main menu has a hundred moving parts and very small buttons to click upon. Objectives are presented in clumsy video clips, with wobbly 'recon' camera shots. Special effects take over half the screen, so you lose units all the time, and the color scheme makes it even harder to find anything. The cursors look like they were stolen from a Win95 theme pack. All of the buildings have moving parts and wheels and shit, and in a CnC RTS too much movement means that an older gamer, like me, is constantly thinking that one (wheeled) building is a tank, and that my tank is an enemy, and that I'm going blind or am visually retarded. The game is busy.
This is obviously a game from way back when gaming really started to get retarded, opulent, and unplayable. Generals was kind of distracting, unclear, overproduced and annoying in exactly the same way. What is so strange is that the gameplay really hasn't changed, but the interface and presentation make the game harder to play. The default shortcut keys are sadistic and unresponsive and unhelpful. An expensive and carefully planned attack goes to shit in seconds and all I see is smoke and little bastard missiles flying all over the place. When did every other attack have to be a missile? Why do I need to buy 6 riflemen in a group? This is not Command and Conquer, this is Generic RTS for the generation who can't chew with their mouth closed but can run three different computers at once while social networking.
This is my latest regret. I could've gotten drunk, or close to drunk, for the same money I spent on a game (and expansion!) that will continue to annoy me if I play it, and continue to bother me if I don't get entertainment out of it – and all the while I will think that I had enough games and enough regrets last week and I even knew better than to buy a game I was pretty sure would be a disappointment. So it's unfair for me to say "Fuck Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars" and I should say, "It's a game that is disappointing, annoying, and a botheration as well as of limited entertainment value. But you might like it, you cretin."
Nothing feels right when I play this game. Five or six missions later I can't even defend my base properly, and I get angry and go to my blog to complain. I was never great at RTS games but a few years ago I could play well enough to finish campaigns. I never had a problem with Red Alert 2 and it has a lot of annoying missions where all kinds of trickery and attacking and action take place and you have to deal with things. Who killed this series? When did every game get so self-involved and joyless?
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