How Long It Takes

Originally in my Perfect Dark video, I was going to devote several paragraphs to highlighting the sheer stupidity of the mini-games in Perfect Dark Zero, which for those who don't know, consist of timing the A button when hacking, holding the thumbstick when lockpicking, and connecting the squares when planting a bomb.

Then I realized H. Bomberguy basically said everything I’d want to say about Mini-Games in his Deus Ex video, so I was just going to link that section of his video…

And then I completely changed the segment anyways.

But one of the thoughts I deleted from the segment does I think add onto his original point that Mini-Games often detract from the core-game even when the mini-games themselves are good, that being…

The time.

During the development of Duke Nukem Forever, someone created a website called “The Duke Nukem Forever List” detailing several notable events that happened since the start of 3D Realms’ infamous sequel. To quote Machinima’s All Your History Are Belong to Us…

“Highlights include: Google’s entire existence, Britney Spears’ entire career, and every single iProduct from Apple. For that matter, the list points out The Beatles’ entire career took less time than Duke Nukem Forever’s production, and most astoundingly, from Kennedy’s challenge to one small step, man landed on the moon faster than it took George Broussard to make a game.”

Here’s another way of thinking about it.

Man landed on the moon faster than it took an entire industry of some of the smartest software engineers and designers to accept that these mini-games suck.

Perfect Dark Zero was hardly alone in its quest to add ”””””gameplay””””” to absolutely everything. From the endless lockpicking mini-games to hacking in Fallout 3, Mass Effect 2, and Human Revolution, it’s not inaccurate to say that we spent over two decades trying to make mandatory mini-games interesting…

Like so many things in the gaming industry, there’s just absolutely no way this was a conscious effort. There’s just no way that if you sat down with a group of designers, and asked them, what’s the one thing they’d like to R&D for twenty years on, they’d choose a fucking mini-game!

And yet, that’s exactly what was manifested into reality.

This is not written to be smug.

I was one of those people who reviewed Deus Ex Human Revolution as a teenager and highlighted in my review that the game’s hacking is “quite different” and “more complete”, failing to realize that neither of those things are inherently positive, nor a thought that wasn’t influenced by the game’s marketing.

There’s so many reasons why bad mini-games were able to be present in what were otherwise some of the best games of their generation for so many years, but this passive complacency was at the heart of most of them.

This daily tunnel vision of “fixing” a “problem” without ever taking a step back to see the big picture of what “fixing” this “problem” even accomplishes.