I’ve discussed the goodness of ActionButton.net in an earlier posting. But I only recently noticed that they have a podcast.
This Oblivion review is a representative sample.
Suppose you’re on a 6-hour roadtrip from San Francisco to Los Angeles, it’s late at night, you’re very tired and thus your mind is strangely suggestible; but you’re driving down the desolate Interstate 5 and have several hours to go before there’s any chance of interesting stimulus. You turn on the ActionButton podcast and suddenly you’re listening to Charles Hartley, in some kind of strange Agent Smith impersonation, telling you how some game called Wonder Project J is really great. So you listen to the next one, and the next until 20 podcasts in a row have beaten down upon you.
This is approximately the most surreal experience I’ve had in 2007. It put me in a very strange mindset for the rest of E3.
If you only listen to a few of these, make sure one of them is Heather Campbell’s review of Zelda: Twilight Princess, which is outstanding.
First of all, thank you for replying. It’s nice to see that not everyone flees at the sign of having an opinion challenged. You even replied much quicker than I did.
Anyways, while you can flip the question, the argument changes. It’s different to argue for a product versus arguing against a review.
While you may not feel it needed explaining because you already played the game yourself, though not very far, it’s easy for anyone to say something is busywork but it’s something else to actually explain why. If it read
” the game feels like busywork because the game requires you to defeat enemies but the enemies can all be defeated by pressing a single button. There’s never a need to block, to dodge or study enemy patterns so fighting is reduced to the too dominant strategy of pressing one button over and over again” that would have been better than “the combat feels like busywork” which is simply not the same.
Defending this errand structure is not necessary to why the review is bad but you asked a question and it would be rude for me to ignore. My first problem is what do you mean by errand structure? All games have you to complete objectives, even ones as simple as find my dog or cook my dinner. If it doesn’t then it ceases to be a game and more of a toy, like the Sims.
For the beginning in Twilight Princess however, it’s because it’s a tutorial to help kids. As much as gamers hate to admit it, Zelda has and always was a kids game. Hard at times maybe but not outside the comprehension of a kid. That’s why if you see the game doing things like “now press O and then X to hit with the sword” as it waits for the player to do the action before rewarding them with a “well done” and letting them continue, it’s to let kids know that they’ve properly performed the requested action and know how to do it when requested later in order to play the game otherwise you might end up with ” I didn’t know how to change items!” or ” How does the horse work?”
The activities even help kids with figuring out problems and puzzles because they have to think “I have to buy the slingshot but the lady won’t give it to me unless I get her cat but how do I move that cat? oh wait, the guy said it was catching fish and that one lady said she’ll give me a fishing rod but I have to get her cradle. But, I can’t reach the monkey. Wait, the guy said I can use the grass on that cliff. I think I’ve figured it out!” so already the game is teaching them how it works in both solving problems and using link’s abilities and items.
I hope that’s what you mean, if it’s not then please help clarify what you mean by this errand structure so I can answer your question.