Dear developers: stop taking the cool out of cool features!

I can imagine the bile-wrenching fury with which a person who has enveloped four years of their life on a game project views my casual and non-specific criticism, but I'm getting a little sick and/or tired of playing games with a phenomenal premise that is botched for one reason or another in the execution. I'm not entirely sure what the methodology is in development lately that implements a feature chock full of ambient coolness and then proceeds to cripple that feature until its practically a chore, but it needs to be surgically excised from the process. I suspect it has to do with the trend of gameplay over-complication that has taken the industry by storm, as though with increases in technology there must be some Newtonian equal and opposite increase in the minutia involved in playing.

I offer for example the recent Xbox Live demo Timeshift as a prime example. History has showed that manipulating time as a gameplay feature is basically cool. Max Payne's bullet time is perhaps the first and best illustration, where I could honestly have spent as much time simply diving through doors, rotating in mid-air slo-mo, and dispatching multiple bad guys before hitting the floor and returning to normal time as I did actually muddling my way through the story. It was a stroke of genius that propped up an otherwise mediocre eight hour action-noir game. The key to making bullet time really cool was, of course, that it was stylish with a cinematic flare that called great action movie sequences to mind and invested the player in the game. Also, it was incredibly simple to pull off, and not really hampered by a lot of constraints. What bullet time did not do was become some boring tool necessary in solving annoying puzzles, and yet one of the first things I realize playing Timeshift is that the time manipulation concept is as much for creating weird time shifting puzzles as enhancing combat.

The moment that manipulating time becomes the obvious and often tedious key to unlocking puzzles, or worse simply a stylish method for substituting quick-save and quick-load (*cough* Prince of Persia), then my attention wanes by exponential degrees. Being able to take a great idea like shifting time and have me bored with it in five minutes seems as unlikely as screwing up a game where you get to ride dragons and breathe fire.

Oh, Lair, how could you drop the ball on that one? In what meeting was it decided to make your airborne steed fly like a 74 Buick without power-steering? Did someone actually say about a game in which you ride dragons that the slow, ponderous controls, no mini-map and vague missions were necessary for some imagined realist immersion? You have dragons, fire breathing, and mid-air and you actually think that what will keep people playing is more difficult gameplay? Just make the damn game and stop trying to create something it's not!

I realize the incredible hubris infused in that kind of statement, but I speak here not as a member of the gaming media but as a player. We can't be the only ones here on the outside that recognize when overcomplicating a basically fun idea makes that idea much less fun. When you've got a great idea for a game, have faith enough in that feature to let it be a centerpiece.

Like Lair, Timeshift is this close to being great fun. With a gorgeous game engine and a great basic concept, this is a game that could still be well worth exploring, but the actual time shifting part has to get better. All they need to do is look at their own intro video in which the character takes a gun out of one enemies hand and kills seven nearby soldiers with that gun, and then destroys a tank. Make sure players can actually do that instead of wasting their time reversing time to get through crumbling buildings, and you've got a game!