Two Games I Didn't Really Like for the Opposite Reasons

I say "really like" because, in the end, I did enjoy these games. Just not much.

I almost-disliked these games for the opposite reasons. And the first one I'll discuss is the foreigner-extermintion game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.

One of the reasons I didn't like this game was because of its pacing. The rest of this sentence is not entirely true, but level after level seemed to have the same pace, which was composed of shooty shooty bang bang, followed by "more shooty shooty bang bang." It's not quite the never-ending gun fight of Black Ops, but that's not a comparison MW2 would want, as BlOps was shooty shooty bang bang porn. The near-non pacing of those games makes you feel like you're playing the previous Call of Duty's louder levels all over again. It's boring. Pacing, man.

But at least MW2's story was silly in the end, which brings me to the other reason why I didn't so much like the game: The crap story! Or the crap writing in general. I could first discuss the crap plot, but I won't discuss at all and yet will just say that it makes no sense and manages to be insulting to Russians (there's a xenophobia to the game that is not just stupid but random -- Call of Duty 4 had the Russians making sense, as psycho as we know they can be). That story is bad and, I think, what the critics would call the worst thing about the game. But to me, the worst thing is MW2's writing part of the writing. Mainly because it comes off as written for illiterate, shooting-obsessed jerk-offs. It tries so hard to be stupid! The writing is so stupid! STUPID!!! WHY IS IT SO STUUUPIIIID?!!!

I liked the co-op though. And I also like the stupid fist fight at the end. And, to be fair, it also lets you shoot Americans...

On to Braid! As I said, this game has the opposite problems (actually it doesn't, but just pretend it does). Whereas CoDMW2 has a pacing problem, Braid has a puzzle problem. Its gameplay is all puzzles. There's nothing wrong with MW2's core gameplay feature (understand the situations as fast as you can and kill Russians). But Braid's core gameplay feature is just: Figure These Out. It's all mental, well-paced mind-using, with some of the later puzzles being easier than the earlier puzzles yet still remaining challenging overall. There's no hand-skill. It too is no fun.

The other weakness in Braid is its writing. I think I may have called it pretentious at some point. It probably is, but I don't have an example of the writing with me to see if I was stupid when I played it. But pretentiousness aside, I do know though that it (even today!) has boring writing. How? Because boring writing is easy to remember. And when I say "boring writing is easy to remember" I mean that: it's easy to remember that it was boring. Interesting writing filled with knowledge is the same; it's easy to remember only that it was interesting. (With entertaining writing, it's easier to remember some of the actual words) Braid's writing? Boring! I could look up samples of the writing to analyze the words for boringness and prove my point, but it's boring so I don't want to.