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Nick’s Column: Animal Instincts
Posted by Nick Dorrington | Dec 7, 2007 03:11

Whilst playing Conan on the PlayStation 3 for a review last week, I came across one of my major gaming pet hates: animal enemies. I’m not talking about the massive squid that nearly pulled my boat under or the ferocious dragon that tormented me for nearly half an hour, no, the most annoying and difficult enemies I faced were just simple, bog-standard lions who made regular, unwanted appearances throughout the second half of the game.

It was the same in my recent play through of Call of Duty 4. As the game progressed, the enemies invariably became more difficult and frustrating to deal with, but the ones that truly caused me the most trouble were the Russian dogs. Hearing the sound of nearby gun-fire would simply send me into attack mode, but the sound of a dog barking close by sent chills down my spine and put me into state of panic, desperately moving my view from side to side in an attempt to source the direction of the incoming animal attack. It was almost as if the evil bastards at Infinity Ward had watched my similar fumbled efforts on the original Medal of Honour game and designed this enemy specifically to strike fear into my heart.

My first memory of animal enemies causing such trouble was back in the early PlayStation 1 days, playing Tomb Raider. In all honestly, I was never the greatest fan of the game, mainly due to the control scheme being stiffer than a dead cat fresh from the taxidermist, but the one moment in the game that really stood out as the most frustrating was the bear fight right near the start. It literally took me days to get past that part, simply because I would panic and jump into the water whenever it got near Lara Croft and her massively oversized chest. It was only when I finally pulled together the composure to move and shoot without continually running away that I was finally able to defeat the bear, only to then find a pack of blood thirsty wolves awaiting me on the next level.

The root of this dread is a mystery to me as I am pretty comfortable with most animals in normal every day life. The only logical explanation I can see is that it is the unpredictability of animal enemies that makes them much harder to deal with than standard human opponents and sets off some reaction in my brain that causes sweaty palms to ensue. Like the late Steve Irwin once said “You know, you can touch a stick of dynamite, but if you touch a venomous snake it’ll turn around and bite you and kill you so fast it’s not even funny.”

This would also be a fair justification for my lack of a similar aversion to animal enemies in the 2d-era of video games. In 2d platformers and adventure games, enemies can usually only attack from one of four directions, above, below, left or right. This greatly decreases the about of unpredictability that can be programmed into CPU attacks, which coupled with the lack of a realistic model for most animals, meant that the cold-sweat that now accompanies the appearance of an animal adversary was never an issue back in the day.

Maybe it is just me who suffers from this problem and I am ranting incoherently about something that nobody can relate to or cares about. All I do know is that the lack of animal enemies (so far), along with the sublime control scheme, is quickly making Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune my game of the year.

Now if only every action adventure game developer would follow Naughty Dog’s lead… 


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thaiguy333 says:
haha. good rant!

lloyd says:
I can relate to that .. In a way.

Fighting an animal in a game always strikes fear in my heart and gives me a huge shot of adrenaline. Something I love. With an animal it’s much more of a life and death feeling then when fighting a human. And i’ve noticed that I only get that feeling with real animals (in a game). A good example of this is when playing Elder Scrolls IV. I came across a cougar (for the first time) and I just knew it could kill me, my heart started beating faster, then my heart really  started  beating when it saw me, I trired running away but it caught me and I fought a futile battle till I died. Later I came across a Minotaur lord for the first time and didn’t get the same feeling as I had gotten when I first encountered the cougar. I ran up to the minotaur and started attacking it... After being pwnd like only a M4 can pwn a kitten I realized something, I hadn’t gotten the same rush as I did when I fought the cougar. Even later I realized that after fighting a bear I got "the rush" and didn’t when fighting an ogre.

So there is somthing about being in a fight with a animal. You don’t like it, but I love it, and encourage developers to use animals in their games
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