Workarounds

written by Blain Newport on Sunday, 17 September, 2011

Dead Island

I've played some more Dead Island this week. But, much like Dead Rising 2 last year, it's devolved into a filler activity. When there's not much else I want to play, I murder more zombies. Also, I finally got stung by one of the game's many bugs. You expect a certain amount of odd behavior in open world games. It's just par for the course. But throwing weapons from outside a house at a monster inside a house made my weapons disappear. In a game where finding good weapons is a major, time consuming activity, that's unacceptable. And I crafted an explosive throwing weapon that never showed up in my inventory.

Given that I already beat the game on the up and up, I decided to just start duplicating weapons. If you throw a weapon and drop it at the same time, you get two copies. So whatever my best weapon is, I just make copies and never have to stress about losing weapons again. So I'm using a bug to rescue my experience from other bugs. Weird.

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The Conduit 2

I really liked using the Wiimote in Metroid Prime 3. Unfortunately, The Conduit 2 only used it for shooting, and not as well, if my memory of MP3 is accurate. MP3 had a more aggressive lock on mechanic, used motion controls for more than shooting, and kept the environments simple. Those may be workarounds, crutches that adulterate the FPS experience, but they worked.

Also The Conduit 2 locked my favorite weapon from the demo I played at PAX 2010 (the shield gun which catches and accumulates bullets so you can throw them back all at once) behind a bunch of searching for secrets. I was hoping the game would have more interesting weapons like that, but it didn't, at least not that I found.