Saturday, February 10, 2018

Hell Yeah - 16/20 hours

I beat Hell Yeah! a second time, which isn't too surprising, considering that it took me 8 hours the first time. Eight times two equals sixteen. But that's not counting in the three hours I spent getting the "jackpot" Achievement. It's a little distressing. Hell Yeah! isn't a bad game, but it's not a good one, either. It's not really fun enough to sustain three consecutive playthroughs.

I suppose I could try and tackle the side missions and go for a true 100% completion, but that's . . . problematic. See, every platforming game with a hint of ambition sooner or later gets the same idea - what if we gated collectibles behind optional levels which require an incredible degree of precision platforming - and in a great game, those challenges are often the best part. Unfortunately for Hell Yeah!, is hasn't really earned the right to torment me for the sake of completionism.

I don't know how to explain it, but, well, take "Luigi's Purple Coins," a Super Mario Galaxy level that has managed to impress itself upon my consciousness as a red haze of fury. I devoted the better part of an afternoon to beating that level. It took me something like 30-40 retries. But I never even considered giving up. Each defeat merely hardened my resolve.

Surely, part of this can be contributed to the fact that I was much younger then, and had more patience for doing pointless tasks that made me miserable, but that's not all of it. The thing about "Luigi's Purple Coins" is that the previous hours of Super Mario Galaxy are a tutorial for how to beat it. Every aspect of the challenge is something you've seen before, just recombined into a new and more terrible form. It's fair. After every failure, you can do a post-mortem and it's usually very clear where and when you made your mistake. Thus, you can always go in with a plan. All you have to do is a series of things you've individually done a hundred times before, simply executed to perfection without a single mistake.

That's not quite the way it is with Hell Yeah!'s side missions. They are usually extremely short (around 30 seconds or so), giving no room for error, but the challenges themselves are not carefully curated. You've got to run through a section of the level, and if the traps just happen to be in the start position, you'll be fine, but if they are midway through their cycles, it's impossible. You don't have time to wait for them to reset and trying to jump on them prematurely is a recipe for suicide. Or you'll have to navigate a harmless section of the level, collecting coins, but the time limit is so strict that if you don't do it frame-perfect, you don't get anywhere near the goal, and it's not clear at all where you made a mistake. Hell Yeah!'s controls aren't the best to start off with. Trying to play the game as if it were a finely balanced platformer just feels like a waste of time.

I don't know what I'm going to do next. The sensible thing would be to just start the whole game over again. Four hours should be just enough to beat it a third time. The only problem with that is my pride. There's this whole section of the game I'd just be writing off. My excuse is that it's not fun and I have no interest in playing it, but what if the truth is that I'm simply very bad at it and don't want to face up to the fact? Does that even matter? Should I be playing games for pleasure, or to improve my skill and experience every facet of what they have to offer?

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