Games I love which can be frustrating: Part 1: Pokemon Platinum and Metal Gear Solid

There are computer games which we can love but even so some of these games can really frustrate us. Some of these frustrations can come from the difficulty of the game, but there are other factors such as some items being nearly impossible to attain, not having much health for the task, timed challenges and limits, a really annoying level or two, trouble finding the last few tokens and so on.

This blog entry is about computer games I love still or have cherished memories of but which have some frustrating parts. Here are games I loved or still love but have annoyed me in parts:

1. Pokemon Platinum (Nintendo DS)

When I last played a Pokemon game before I bought Platinum when I was in my final year of university, I was about 12 or 13 back in the days when Britain only had Pokemon Red and Blue and there were only 150 Pokemon to catch. Since then the total up to Platinum is around the 500 mark. This would be fair enough if you could "catch em' all" as they say, in the one game, but as far as I'm concerned Japan with the new Pokemon games has taken obsessive compulsive disorder to a new level, 2 levels in fact.


The first level of annoyance: You need to catch Pokemon in more than one game. Although this can be fun if you are bored, the frustration comes from the hours of levelling up in order to stand a chance of being able to get some of the more difficult monsters. For example it took me 40 hours of gaming to be able to reach and catch Mewtwo on Pokemon Fire Red for my Platinum team. Overall this level isn't too bad because Pokemon are available if you fork out the cash for Nintendo's "Pokemon Corporation" subsidiary, i.e. buy the other games.


The second and supreme level of annoyance: the so called "event Pokemon". Nintendo actually made it impossible to catch all the current Pokemon unless you fulfil the following conditions: A. you cheat somehow or B. go to one of the limited edition and expensive to get to events. I don't consider event Pokemon as part of the completion list.

2. Metal Gear Solid (Playstation)

My first annoyance for this game would be the damn stairs where you can't be stealthy, there weren't any health packs and the enemies shooting at you on the way up seemed nearly endless. I could never do this bit without the invincibility cheat in my disc.



The next annoyance was the battle with the sniper, where you had to lie on the ground to be able to aim properly, and you had to take some sort of drug, diazepam I think it was to keep yourself from shaking and aim your sniper rifle properly. If you were standing you would be shot from above but if you were lying down you still had a high chance of getting shot. Either way aiming was more difficult it usually was.





Now over to Mr. Osborn for his words of approval.

Thank you Geordie Green Lantern. Today I approve of: catching them all and hiding in boxes.