Rich Kyanka is so right — video games today are way too complex, and it makes them not so fun. (When the article goes off their front page, it'll be here, but you really don't want to go to that page yet. Seriously.)

I don't spend much time playing video games these days, being busy with research, music, not drawing comics, and (distressingly, for the past two days) blogging. When I have tried playing games, I get fed up pretty quickly.

The two games that I'm currently really wanting to like are Sly Cooper and Dark Cloud. There's also a bunch of others which I've really wanted to like, but just can't. Here's an overview.

Sly Cooper

Sly Cooper is a great game. It's slick, it's got tight controls, the premise is really cool, the story is fun and doesn't get in the way of the gameplay, and the gameplay itself is pretty varied.

Unfortunately, the variety of gameplay sometimes causes problems. Right now I'm stuck on the "Piranha Lake" minigame in the third episode.

The premise of this minigame is that you have a limited amount of time to light all of the torches in an area. The only thing you have for fuel in the flamethrower is the oil extracted from running over the piranhas in the eponymous lake. There is no rhyme or reason to the time limit or the mechanics of running over the fish to get their oil (okay, it's just a silly premise to give the player a reason for doing a certain thing).

The piranhas move very fast, and the aim on the flamethrower has to be pretty exact. Plus, the torches are very oddly-distributed, they blend in with the background, and the camera movement really sucks.

I think the best I've gotten is 2/3 done before the timer runs out. And that's when working as fast as I can.

Did they even put this section through playtesting?!

I feel so frustrated being stuck on such a stupid little minigame which has nothing to do with the rest of the game. The rest of the game is brilliant, and fun, and so, I want to love Sly Cooper, but I feel like it's just constantly slapping me in the face and saying, "Ha ha ha, you can't go on until you do some penance! Eat my shit and like it!"

Dark Cloud

Dark Cloud has a very interesting premise. Take two parts Zelda, one part Nethack, and a dash of Sim City spiced with Populous, and you get its gameplay concept.

Unfortunately, add in horrible controls, a lousy camera, and an obtuse item system, and you get its actual gameplay.

It's one of the few games I've played which actually punishes you for doing well. Manage to hit an enemy? Your weapon takes damage. If it takes too much damage, it breaks. Permanently. You can repair a weapon, but it never gives you enough "repair powder," so unless you want to lose all of your weapons early on, you have to keep on leaving the dungeon, go back to the Mayor's house, and get more repair powder. Except that doing that resets the dungeon (so you have to re-defeat all of the monsters, and re-find the keys you need to continue), and you can't actually leave the dungeon until all of the monsters are dead unless you have "escape powder" (which is even more rare than repair powder).

The status display is out of the way and very tiny, and so it's hard to tell how many HP you have left during a battle. Pretty much all of the items you can find are useless (because they're things which you get for free by finding a pool of water) or obtuse (and have nothing to indicate when, where, or why to use them; half of my inventory is filled up with fishing bait, for example).

Also, I don't know if this is a bug or a "feature," but after I got a new weapon, I tried to transfer my "stonecutter" power (which you get early on, and is vital in the first dungeon), and discovered that it was totally missing. It wasn't in my inventory, it wasn't on any of my weapons, and it wasn't anywhere to be found. And there's no way to replace it. Since half of the monsters in the floor I'm on are made of stone (which makes your weapons break even faster if you don't have stonecutter), I'm basically screwed. And I'm not interested enough in the game to start over.

Conker's Bad Fur Day

The game has a cute premise; cheery platformer stereotypes turned umop-apisdn. For the most part, the gameplay is pretty good, but like Sly Cooper, it runs into a critical moment where the game becomes unplayably difficult simply due to a poor execution of an idea which shouldn't have made it past playtesting. Where I got stuck on it was an underwater labyrinth; horrible camera controls, extremely dark visuals with no clear sense of where you're supposed to go, enemies who can attack you when you have no idea where they are, and a limited supply of time (air, in this case, with too few "refuel" points) make for a very frustrating experience.

Also, it often gets way too self-absorbed with its own humor (which is funny, but not that funny), and many of the cutscenes are just plain tedious (most notably the introduction; the whole Clockwork Orange tribute is funny the first time, but I really don't want to sit through the 5-minute segment where it slowly pans out from Conker's eye again), and there's no way to skip them when seeing them for "the first time," "the first time" being defined as "you haven't saved that particular game slot after the cutscene was showed." So if you do want to (heaven forbid) replay the game, you have to sit through all that boring crap all over again.

Shenmue

Great visuals, lousy control, horrible voice acting, and gameplay which essentially consists of "talk to everyone on the street until the next part, which is introduced by needing to reflexively hit buttons until you get enough of them right. Oh, and the game engine is a highly-modified version of Virtua Fighter, so we have to make sure that the player is well aware of this by forcing them to learn Virtua Fighter-style anal-retentive combo executions." About the only thing I ever do with Shenmue is go to the arcade so I can play Space Harrier.

Jet Grind Radio

Clever game concept. Great artwork and music. Very cool style. Feels like playing hide-and-go-seek with a three-year-old who insists he's invisible.

Games I almost always find fun

Tetris: Enough said.

Tetrisphere (N64): The reason I keep my N64 around. Awesome puzzle game (though it's Tetris only in name). I can play it for hours and hours without getting bored. I think the last time I played it, I went for 6 hours straight.

Beatmania (PSX): Play the music or get booted off of stage. I've written enough about this in the past, so I won't repeat myself. :) Digital crack.

Mr. Driller (Dreamcast): The reason I keep my Dreamcast around. An entertaining mix of Dig-Dug and Puyo-Puyo. Digital heroin.

Mario 8-bit series: The original 8-bit trilogy is great for a bit of mindless "Let's see how far I can get" play. There's a story but it's secondary to the gameplay, and so if you manage to beat the game, you get warm fuzzies, but if you don't, no big loss. You don't have to get deeply-involved in the gameplay, and you don't have to have a goal of finishing it. After the 8-bit series (including the 16-bit remake of the original trilogy-plus-one), they got extremely story-oriented, and so they had to put in save points, and then the concept of replay stopped being about "let's see how far I can get" and started being "let's see how much stuff I unlock." Unfortunately, once you've unlocked everything ("Yay, I completed Star Road and got to the inverse world and beat the game that way," "Yay, I got all 120 stars and got to meet Yoshi," etc.), the game pretty much loses its appeal, but in the original saveless "play until you're done" games, beating the game just gives you more challenges - see if you can beat it in a certain amount of time, see if you can beat it without warping, etc. See if you can still beat it 5 years later. That sort of thing.

Odd-numbered Zelda games, and to a lesser extent the fourth one: The original Zelda provides plenty of replay opportunities. Beat the game? Okay, now beat the second quest. Or beat it without getting the sword at the beginning. Or beat it without picking up any heart containers, or beat it with picking up all the heart containers, or whatever. Plenty of possibilities. The third one (Link to the Past, SNES) doesn't afford quite the same replay possibilities, but between a great story, plenty of heart containers and so on to find, and special stuff that happens when you beat the whole game without dying, there's reason enough to go back. The fifth one (Ocarina of Time) is similar to the third one; lots of hidden stuff, and a great story. The fourth one (Link's Awakening) is nice for occasional replay, like rereading The Last Unicorn, though for some reason the GBC remake (Zelda DX) doesn't manage to captivate me as the black-and-white original did (and a lot of the game just seems like it's a gameboy version of the third one), but it's still a nice one to keep around anyway. Unfortunately, the second one (Link's Adventure) and the sixth one (Majora's Mask) aren't very playable, for different reasons... 2 spends too much time trying to be a weird cross between RPG, platformer, and fighter and has no replayability, while 6 has the opposite problem — it has too much side stuff to find, and it gets totally overwhelmed in side-quests to the point that I just lose interest. It'll be interesting to see how Wind Waker turns out. (FWIW, I don't count the Zelda: Oracle games as Zelda games. They weren't even done by Nintendo, and the gameplay is only superficially Zelda. They don't feel at all like Zelda.)

What do all those games have in common? Simple gameplay which increases in difficulty, not in frustration. They all have a sense of being a challenge to see how far you can go, to see if you can outdo yourself, to be better and faster and more nimble.

They don't rely on subtlety or confusion or difficult visuals or unreasonable obstacles to provide a challenge. They reward the gamer for being good, rather than punishing the gamer for being imperfect. And, most importantly, they're fun.