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Old 05-03-2007, 09:38 AM   #638
MoriartyL
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I was playing P.N.03. At first glance, it looks like an action game mimicking dance. I bought the game in the hopes that it would have some measure of elegance. Looks can be deceiving.

What P.N.03 is is a 3D (third-person) action game mimicking an old 2D action game- a space shooter, maybe. The dance-like animations were grafted on top and are completely at odds with the gameplay. Because the gameplay, every bit of it, is defined by forced rigidness. I can see the idea behind it, sort of. The old shmups posed the sort of challenge that could only be passed with training and practice. There could be enough enemies to fill the entire screen, so that the player would have trouble finding a safe spot. In 3D, it's never like that. On a 3D plane you can just move out of the way of shots as you're fighting back, and if there were enough enemies to fill the screen it would be (due to the complexity of 3D navigation) completely unplayable.

So what's the solution? Have players fight in 3D (against only a few enemies at a time), but completely cripple them. The movement is digital (as opposed to analog), like RE4. You can't move faster or slower, you can just move or not move. So if there's someone shooting from your left, you've gotta take a second of slow turning to face in that direction. You can barely move backwards at all- it's too slow. You can jump in only three precise directions: forward, backwards, and straight up, with the straight jump crippled further by being uselessly low. Since left and right only turn, the game also gives you the ability to slowly dodge to the left or right, though again it's completely digital- you can't control how far to move to the left or right, which can lead to situations where you move to the side and find that you're still completely vulnerable. Even the camera control is awkwardly rigid, with just a few camera angles to switch between (no manual camera movement), none of which will show you everything you need to see. You're not just fighting with the AI in this game- you're fighting with your controls.

But wait!- don't think that's all! In fact, if they'd left the awkwardness at that, the game would still be pretty playable. But the master stroke is this: You cannot move and shoot at the same time. In order to do any damage at all, you need to stand perfectly still. Which, of course, means that you're going to die. If you've got three robots flying back and forth and shooting all over, you never have the opportunity to shoot, so it's just a matter of time until you get killed. Hope you've got a Continue to spare.

But wait- there's a way out of such a situation! There are special moves, which you can buy by getting money, which you can only get by playing through an excessive number of tedious optional levels. These special moves are used by inputting -precisely!- certain short combinations of directions on the digital pad. So say you've got three robots in front of you, all shooting wildly, and you want to take them all out with the "left-right-left" move. So you've got to stand right in front of their fire, and before you get hit press left,right,left. Simple, right? If you said "right" then you haven't spent much time with the Gamecube controller's notoriously iffy digital pad. I envy you. The scene goes something like this:

Player: left-right-left
[the game doesn't do anything]
Player: Left, .. ,Right, .. ,Left.
[the game doesn't do anything]
Player: LEFT,RIGHT,LEFT!
[still nothing, but the robots are starting to shoot back now]
Player: LEFTRIGHTLEFTLEFTRIGHTLEFTLEFTRIGHTLEFT!!
[Game Over.]

This scene is very common. Anyway, do you see the brilliance of the design? By putting artificial stumbling blocks into a 3D world, they bring back all the frustration of the good old days! Not the elegance or the potential for getting good at it, but all the frustration. And isn't that really why people played games in the first place?


Well, I put up with all the frustration because, hey!, it's just what the game's designed for. You can't fault a game for its basic premise, can you? I trained myself to never take any initiative that had any slight bit of risk involved, because in this game any slight risk equates to almost-certain damage. (When it goes bad you're too busy fighting the controls to get out of the way.) I learned patience, training myself to watch the enemies and only come out for the very brief gaps in their fire. I even put myself through a lot of the "optional" levels which are essentially padding (repetitive and tedious), so that I could get more powerful suits and special moves. (The padding isn't really optional- without those suits you'd have a very hard time getting anywhere.) But now I've reached my limit. I've reached a boss with ridiculously powerful attacks (one-shot kills), and where you've gotta fight it in a tiny little enclosed space with almost no place to hide. And this boss seems to take around two thousand shots to beat. And this is the point where I say, "Enough is enough!". If I were to replay the entire level leading up to it, over and over and over (and it should be noted that it's a very frustrating level), maybe I'd beat it eventually. But why should I?

I'm never going to play this game again.
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