ihavebeenfloated

I’d hate to bemoan a game for being too difficult. It says something about me as a gamer that maybe I’m not prepared to accept just yet, but I think I’m going to have to. I’ve always been a bit odd when it comes to video games. I love them, I play a lot of them, but if I game takes too long for me to beat, gets too difficult too quickly, or is just too difficult in general, I give up.

I’m sure a lot of people are like that. I’ve never beaten an “hardcore” RPG, meaning Baldur’s Gate 2 and/or even Final Fantasy games. (RPGs I’ve beaten? Parasite Eve for the PSX, but that hardly counts. Oh, and Knights of the Old Republic but that game is/was so easy to play and beat that it’s laughable.) A lot of puzzle games I play for short periods of time before I get annoyed. (Intelligent Qube, one of my all time favorite games for some reason, I could only play through the first few levels.) Beat’em’ups usually aggravate me one they get more difficult than the first few sets of levels, though I am doing pretty well with Viewtiful Joe on the NDS.

So, maybe I’m not much of a gamer after all. I see no joy in trying to master a particularly difficult situation in a game, most of the time. If I can’t solve a puzzle or beat a boss, I look up a guide. If I still can’t do it, well, then I’m pissed off. I play games to have fun, and difficulty that frustrates me is not something I want to deal with. I want to sit down for a few minutes and have a good time.

Mario Kart DS almost had this, if it wasn’t for the fact that the randomness of the items (especially that fucking blue shell) had me wanting to throw the controller across the room by the time I got to the 150cc races. Electroplankton has this, but, uh, that’s not a game. Metroid Prime Pinball has this, it’s great fun even in short amounts, even though it’s not as varied as it could be. Tony Hawk in all its incarnations has this. Yes, these are all DS games.

I was wary of Trauma Center. I heard about it, people raving, and I was interested. Then I heard from other people, speaking of the fact that the game is mostly repeating the same actions over and over again, just having to do them faster and faster. I lost interest in this after my semi-miserable experience with Kirby: Canvas Curse. I’m no good with the stylus. I can do things with it, sure, but you ask me to do quick movements with high accuracy is like asking a blind man to find the number hidden in colored splotches. It might sound like I’m over-exaggerating, but I’m not.

So, I lost interest.

Then I picked it up used at Gamestop, knowing that I could return it if I didn’t like it. (It’s like renting games, but for free. Buy the most expensive game you get your hands on. Try it out for a few days, six is the max, and then return it for another game that is the same price or less expensive. Work your way down through cheaper games, then just get all your money back. It’s ingenious!)

I loaded up, played the first few tutorial levels, and Trauma Center seemed pretty cool in this context. You control the game solely with the stylus. You cut open patients by tracing a line on the flesh, or tumors. You inject medicine into the patient by dragging up on the medicine bottle and then just touching the stylus to where you want to inject it. Pull things out by using the forceps. It’s pretty self-explanatory.

A sample surgery will require you to cut open a patient, zoom in on an organ, inject something into a tumor to shrink it, use the scalpel to cut out the tumor, pull the tumor out, drain blood from the hole where the tumor was, place a mesh thing over the hole, spread some goo on it, rub it into the wound, zoom out of the patient, suture up the patient (draw a zig-zag over the incision), rub more magic goo on it, then bandage it by dragging bandage over the stitches.

And that’s it. There are some other things you do but the tools never change. The things you do never really change. The only thing that really changes is how fast you have to do these things and how critical your patients are.

I suppose it’s an acquired taste I don’t have. I can’t do things quickly and under pressure. The first major surgery they through at me, I beat it on my first try but by the end of it my palms were pouring sweat and I was out of breath. It was a cool feeling, but I knew that it could quickly turn to aggravation.

It did. But the next surgery I was failing multiple times for no apparent reason, which turned into failing multiple times because I knew why. Then I got pissed off. I finally beat it, but it was such a struggle that I decided that was enough. I returned the game.

So, yeah. I didn’t like Trauma Center very much. It’s not a bad game, it’s just too difficult for me. (It was too difficult for Trista as well, and she sticks with thing far more than I do.) I want to have fun, not tear my hair out.