Water Levels
Nothing ruins a fun game like a good, or a bad, or really any, water level.
You’re chugging along, working your way through known territory, when all of a sudden you find yourself faced with working through some horrible underwater temple of some kind. All of your weapons, items, and movements are useless.
These levels are always the shittiest ones. Always. Why? Well, maybe it’s because people spend months and years designing the physics, gameplay, and controls of a game, and then decide to completely ruin them for the sake of one level. One level that combines boredom and terror in a really overused way.
On the terror side, facing the fear of drowning is not one of my favorite activities. Whenever people compare horrible deaths, it’s either drowning or burning alive, and let’s face it, at least if you burned alive you would make for some good news footage later to be used in a Metallica video.
Also, there aren’t a lot of really terrifying burning alive deaths in video games. I’m not saying people don’t burn to death, but I am saying that you usually don’t spend three minutes struggling, panicking, trying desperately to find a fire extinguisher or decent blanket or bucket of sand or whatever.
And another thing. If you did happen to go to the brink of drowning, I would think your brain might be permanently affected. Maybe if you push it too far, Link should walk with a limp for the rest of the game. Or maybe dialogue is altered so people are constantly talking about how you’re “not like you used to be” and then quickly stop each other as you enter the room.
On the boredom side, the plan for a water level seems to be pretty much like a normal level, but slower and darker.
How about a look at some classic horrible water levels?
TMNT
This might be the granddaddy of them all. So many problems it’s hard to know where to start.
For one thing, as a turtle man, shouldn’t a water level be easily navigable? If you can run through a warehouse and kill with a sword, I would think that swimming around would be easy as hell. A welcome break, like if I spent the day attacking robots with nunchuks and then someone asked me to nap and eat a whole bag of Doritos. I would be in my natural environment and therefore very comfortable, not likely to encounter any big problems.
Instead, this whole thing is shit because you can hold your breath for about four seconds, and everything around you is electrified. Also, you pretty much suck at swimming.
I could understand if one of four turtles was bad at swimming. Maybe Michaelangelo was spending too much time being a party dude and never learned. Maybe Raphael was cool, but crude to his swim instructor. Maybe Donatello was busy screwing around with a laser-guided…you get the idea.
But not one decent swimmer amongst all these TURTLES! Unforgivable.
Earthworm Jim
I have a real love/hate thing going with this series.
On the one hand, it felt like they did some interesting stuff, and they mixed it up a lot. The first level of EWJ has ups and downs in terrain that make it feel like a real environment instead of a 2-D walkway that happens to be covered in baddies.
But some of it was just plain annoying, and nothing more so than the stupid submarine made out of the world’s most breakable glass and with a very limited time limit.
I know that there is a limit to applying logic to things that were designed to be illogical, but come on. Could you think of a worse submarine to be in? All glass, difficult to control, and has to be refilled by connecting a device that’s like threading a needle with spaghetti? And maybe a glass bubble boat would be awesome for looking at fish and crap. But when designed for navigating cramped rocky caverns, I would suggest, well, any other material known to man. Cardboard. Mucus.
Just like TMNT, you have a limited amount of air, a low ability to navigate around, and you find yourself more delicate than a robin’s egg I completely destroyed in my hand as a child. Doesn’t that sound fun?
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
Much has been said about this one, a castle where you have to equip heavy boots in order to sink to the bottom. Then unequip the heavy boots to rise to the top again. Then re-equip to sink into another chamber. The re-un-equip to—you get the idea.
The less you have to use a menu in a game, the more the game has succeeded in making gameplay fast, logical, and fun. There are fifty goddamn buttons on a modern controller, can’t one turn the boots on and off? Select maybe? Select don’t do shit.
What’s really obnoxious about this one, and this type of thing, is that the gameplay has removed an ability from a character that is a very common human ability: sinking. I know not everyone can float, but goddamn it, everyone can sink. Ask any corpse in a river how they sank, and they’ll explain “I just…did.”
I like collecting items to gain special abilities in games. What I don’t so much care for is collecting items that make you into a normal human. Why not start the game with the guy paralyzed, and he can slowly collect magic totems that allow him to talk, then eat, then wipe himself? That sounds like a ball.
This one make me upset to a level that I’m not proud of and prefer not to discuss.
As in the last entry in this series, I’ve got a handful of suggestions regarding making these water levels tolerable:
1. You don’t need to slow the shit down so much. Just a little hint of blue, I get it. Changing the entirety of the physics of a game makes no sense, and it never works quite right. When I used Moon Boot cheats on Game Genie, it was always fun for about four seconds, and then you would go flying off the screen and not really even know where you were. These worlds and the objects in them were designed to be used by a character obeying certain laws of physics, so don’t pervert those laws to the point that they have to be served papers and fret over impending court dates.
2. There is a huge difference between challenging and outright frustrating. That difference: In a side-scroller where I’m slicing up foot clan assholes, a stage where I’m swimming, which is impossibly difficult, is enraging. You wouldn’t make level 3 of Tetris a first-person shooter. Because people who want to play Tetris want to play Tetris, not Medal of Tetris Honor. So make your water levels consistent with the gameplay style of the rest of your game, in terms of WHY it’s fun or WHY someone would be attracted to it.
3. Gameplay has progressed to a point where a character dying upon contact with water is an unacceptable proposition. You should be allowed to struggle back to the edge, and just the mere act of taking a dip shouldn’t kill you. I’ve fallen out of a boat at a time when I was so drunk that I couldn’t even figure out why I was in the boat in the first place, and I’m still alive today. It’s not asking much that an intergalactic bounty hunter in a full space/battle suit would be able to swim A LITTLE.