Who's Up For Space Invaders?

I hate video games. Not all of them, just most of them. Whatever happened to games where you could pop it in and start playing? Why did they have to add so many buttons? I remember playing dozens of games of Atari at my friends house in the 80's. All of these games required one button. That's right one button. When you only have that one button it becomes fairly simple to figure out any type of game strategy. Push the button to: shoot, pass or jump. Easy enough.

This weekend we rented The Da Vinci Code for PS2. I just can't emphasize enough how gratifying it feels to spend 30 minutes of my weekend trying to figure out how to open a window in a video game. The entire time it felt like I had a giant flashing sign over my head that said, "MORON". It would have been a bit more acceptable had this occurred near the end of the game but this happened in the FIRST SCENE.

Between Jules and I, that's right it is actually a two adult job, we finally got the window opened and proceeded to the beginning of the game. Next, we found a UV light with which we located a secret message on the Mona Lisa (right here I need to state that it took a very long to do these two things). Yep, there's that secret message. Right there. Huh? So now what? The people in the game aren't helping any. No hints. Oh well, there must be something else around here somewhere. So we look around and find nothing. Then we look around again and find nothing. Again we take a look around for something and find nothing. Just to be on the safe side we check around a few hundred more times to make sure there is still nothing. And there conistantly is nothing every time. Then we go back to the message for the 800th time and discover that once you pass over every letter in the message with the UV light a new screen opens up where you can begin to decrypt the message. Seems intuitive enough, don't know how we missed that. Maybe one of the stupid ass characters could have said something like, "Notice how the characters in the message brighten up when the UV light passes over them" or something like that. Anything would have helped more than, "I don't see anything, maybe we should look around". Stupid assholes!

The message turns out to be another clue, and thankfully a fairly simple one. At this point in the game you need to fight the security guards in the museum. You gotta love fights where you have both offensive and defensive modes. For me I'd like to have something like SQUARE = punch and, if it needs to be really complicated, CIRCLE = block. But hey, that would be far too simple. What you need is to use at least three buttons in attack mode, and just so things aren't overly complicated we'll use the same set of three buttons in defensive mode. Hey, and just to make it challenging the game should display the correct button sequences at the bottom of the screen to help you out. That should really help those people who can look at two places at once and coordinate between the 425 button combinations that you need to knock that bastardly security guard out.

A couple of deaths at the hands of the guards and I'd had enough. Played for what seemed like hours and didn't even get through the first level. Screw It! Time for Space Invaders.