I've been pretty lax on my blog posts of late, in part because I've been pretty lax on my gaming. While most have been talking about Alan Wake, Read Dead and E3 2010 (quick digression- who'd have thought this time last year that Nintendo would have the E3 showing most tailored to hardcore gamers of all the big three? Being actually quite a big fan of Nintendo's last 3D offering for all its faults, I'm there day one for 3DS.), I've been revisiting 2007-2009. The discs currently spinning in my 360 and ps3 are Assassin's Creed 2, Bioshock and Tomb Raider Underworld., all three of which have taught me an important lesson.

When it comes to games, I have the patience and attention span of a seven year old child. Actually, no, scratch that. My job entails teaching elementary school kids and kindergartners English. Especially as a pre school educator, it's vital to keep kids engaged at every point of a lesson. Attention spans are so short, a typical half hour chunk of my job is, to use a gaming analogy, more like a go on Warioware rather than an epic JRPG. 

A fair few of my kids have Wiis and DSs (DSes? How do you pluralise DS in text? It's a tougher issue even than the American press had when talking about their Megadrives- it's Geneses, clearly), and while they might tell me about dabbling in New Super Mario Brothers and Galaxy 2 from time to time, the games that come up as most popular are Pokemon and Dragon Quest IX. Now I've not played either of these games, for the simple reason that the pacing wouldn't appeal, but the elementary school kids I teach are incredibly invested in these games that simply don't offer the instant gratificatoin they demand in their humdrum school days.

As for me, meanwhile, I'm a fairly patient sort, but the aforementioned three games I've been playing are pushing that patience to the point of me almost giving up on all three of them. Yes, I demand quicker and cheaper thrills from my entertainment than the children I work with do.

First, Bioshock, a game I had already previously given up on in fact, a couple of years ago before recently restarting after getting hold of its sequel, 

When people gush over Bioshock, nine times out of ten they're talking about the awesome dystopian atmosphere it sets up, and the compelling plot. I'm inclined to agree, but feel the game itself is a pain to endure. I was so horribly poor at it at first that I would endlessly run out of ammo and die mere minutes in, getting more and more frustrated before finally deciding 'sod it, I'll put it on easy'. Now I am steaming through it, but with no threat at all, a good deal of the atmosphere is lost. Playing the game is a chore I have to get through to see more of Rapture and the gratification of experiencing the story is delayed by the game itself.

So, too for Assassin's Creed 2. Not because it's too hard for me, it's not. It's a game where I enjoy the story, the setting, and even the sort of open world collecting I'm usually inclined to pass on- I really have fun unravelling the mysterious videos you get for finding glyphs. Again, though, that joy of seeing more of the game world is obscured- this time by absolutely stupid controls. Why does pressing the jump button while I'm climbing to boost myself up send me careering of the side of a building? Why does running require me to hold the stick in the right direction and the right trigger and the A button, the sort of ludicrously convoluted scheme that was supposed to be rendered irrelevant by the existence of analogue controls in the first place a decade and a half ago? Why is the difference between graceful roof running and a twisted ankle in said dumb sprinting a pixel perfect camera alignment? Why is a game so good held back by something so easily fixed by an options menu?  Again, the game is a chore to suffer through so as to get at what lies beneath.

Tomb Raider Underworld meanwhile, appears at first glance to appeal to my deisre for instant gratification. Should you find yourself at a loss in puzzles for some reason, there's optional hints, while the difficulty of the game is pleasingly adjustable, allowing for player and enemy health and frequency of items to be altered. 

The game itself however, completely falls flat. Accomplished action adventure titles like TR's usurper Uncharted use their camera system to carefully direct the player, showing a grabbable ledge in the player's periphery, or outright showing you where to go if you've been cluelessly tooling around for too long and press select. Prince of Persia is famed for it's camera swoops on entering a vast room that show the player where to head. In TRU, the camera is resolutely glued behind Lara, rarely if ever tilting in a scripted fashion to show off where to go. This writer gave up on the  game not far into the second stage, which begins with a climb up a mountainside strongly affected by this flaw. With no clue of what lies out of camera pan, or worse no rwal idea of which textures can be clinged to and which can't, leaps of faith, falls, and restarts occur over and over, an issue no slider in the options menu can fix. Unlike Bioshock and AC2, meanwhile, there seems very little to enjoy even if you get past the stodgy mechanics. It didn't take long for me to feel that any gratification I might gain from the game could be indefinitely delayed.

There is one game, meanwhile, that I've probably put in a good hour or so every day to over the last six weeks, making it probably my most played game of the year so far. Cubed Rally Racer on iphone is a casual game, yes, but one that proves casual doesn't always imply lightweight.. The premise is simple- here is an adorable car that might have driven off of a forecourt in 3D Dot Game Heroes that you must guide through one short section of track randomly pulled from a list. Beat that and you have two sections strung together to get through, then three, four, five, until having to deal with a stage 99 sections long. The ease with which you can tumble off the road or run out of fuel makes the game gut wrenchingly hard, but it keeps its inputs uncomplicated- the player is tasked with a left and right steering control and an accelerator, that's it- and deaths are always fair. Fail and get frustrated? you can choose to reshuffle the track parts and try again with a different circuit as many times as you like, or even grind early levels to boost your ego. The joy of play here is in the game itself, not the window dressing, and its pleasures are immediate, huge, and dare I say, visceral (a horrid game writing cliche, sure, but at least I wasn't using it in relation to combat).

Don't get me wrong. Big, deep games are of vital importance, and great things in themselves. But as I find myself maturing as an adult in my late twenties, I find myself regressing as a gamer. To me, like moving parts in machinery, the more that's there, the more that can go wrong, and I'm glad there are people like Cubed Rally Racer's No Can Win and Popcap around to saucily put out right away while developers perhaps held in higher regard want you to pay for a fancy dinner and write them poetry first.