The Dog Dilemma

There's always that infuriating point in game when everything grinds to a halt because you need to compete one bloody pointless task.

I was playing Lord of The Rings today (don't judge me, it's a substitute for my RPG withdrawal) and yet again I get stumped on a supposidely easy part of the game. As the young Frodo Baggins (played by a piece of wood) you have to collect a handful of herbs for one of the crusty hobbits before leaving the shire. He insists its for his rhematism but I suspect he and his hairy footed friends are tripping out on 'herbal tea' like the surviving members of a psychdelic dad band. The herbs are easy to pluck from the surrounding greenery until you reach Farmer Maggot's land. Two fenced off fields, both containing the last two batch of herbs are guarded by Maggot's dribbling, gnashing hobbit hungry wolves. You have to jump over the fences undetected and grab the herbs without being seen, which sounds a lot easier that it actually is. Nothing is fluent in the game, the controls are jerky and lurch the camera about in the fashion of Frank from Shameless, and attempting to jump over silly pieces of fence with your tiny legs mostly ends in a fail and you need about a mile run up to clear a two foot space.

My grumblings follow suit when I had another similar experience with the 'Dog Dilemma' in a game. Remember the 1995 highly pixelated pc game Full Throttle? anyone? you know, the one where you play a motorcycle dude Ben in a futuristic landscape where badasses like the protagonist shun hovercrafts for the thrill of archiac mechanical...anyone? no?

Well the game was fun until I shamefully got stumped in an early problem solver. You have to retrieve a spanner, a wrench or something from a junkyard but it's guarded by a little shit of a bulldog. I wouldn't mind so much about failing again and again to distract the dog only if it didn't keep repeating the same cut sequence again and AGAIN! I think I learned how to grab Little Shit's attention away from me with something of meat variety but the sequence still haunts my thoughts and dreams.

Unfortunately I don't have the gamer frame of mind. If I can't do something the first time I squeal and beat my fists on the keyboard, screaming gibberish like a sexully frustrated ape. I don't like failure, or persistence. I don't like playing the parts in games where tact is vital to success. I'm as tactless as a worn blob of blue tac which once held up tinsel in your living room but has lost it's hue and is slowly gliding down the wall on its own trail of grease. I prefer games where yes, a little thinking can be done but otherwise you blast gun ho into a swarm of enemies splicing them with a big fecking sword. The only way the LOTR could improve in my eyes is if Frodo could steal some rockets from Gandalf's cart and do some target practice on the pathetic wolves.

More irritating tactful objectives include the 'protect the gimp' quests as favoured by the likes of Oblivion. You finish a task for some posh self important character(yay!)only to get the job of babysitting their cousin/auntie/bit on the side through a hazardous cavern (gah.) So you have to defend yourself in a full front attack whilst ensuring your foppish protectee doesn't trip over and die from a vicious looking leaf left carelessly on the floor. I'm exaggerating of course but these characters are so suseptible to death you wonder how they got through at least twenty years of life without accidentally brutally stabbing themselves with a fork whilst spearing peas on thier dinner plate.

As predicted I've given up on LOTR and I'm waiting for the distilled evil that is Wow to download onto my pc. Maybe one day when I grow a pair (figuratively of course) I'll ditch the fantasy games and scare myself silly with Bioshock or something of equal pant-pooping fun.