The idea of beating Harebrained Schemes’s Shadowrun trilogy was the first stress-induced burst of detour behavior that threatened to derail my nascent return to computer science. I ended up watching the credits roll on the first and second entries, and got partway invested in this one until it all came to a screeching halt a few hours in.
While I was enjoying the ride, and the amusing developer audio commentary, I was starting to get bored. Resident Evil had its hooks in me, but good. One franchise was hard enough to juggle alongside an intensive undergraduate study regimen; two was asking the impossible.
The universe provided a solution: halfway through a rather interesting mission involving the disruption of feng shui I found my avatar stuck between two pieces of furniture. This was the first time this had happened in my franchise playthrough, and this on the tail of beating four Resident Evil games in a row without so much as a graphical hiccup. Resolving this bug would have meant re-doing thirty-ish minutes of play.
I uninstalled Hong Kong on the spot. I have the patience of geology when it comes to completing tasks in video games, but there is one thing I will not abide, and that’s a game that wastes my time.
But aren’t all video games a waste of time, you ask? True, but then there’s genuine minutes and hours lost to issues that have nothing to do with the play of the game, and everything to do with the incompetence of the game developer. And the further out we get from the original launch of a title, the less acceptable these oversights become.
I doubt I’ll come back and finish Hong Kong some day. Harebrained had already started to lose me by going ultra verbose in Dragonfall and they only doubled down here. I also think I would have been far more invested if they’d pulled a Richard Garriot a la Ultima and allowed players to develop a single character through all three games. Starting over from “level one”, to crib some pen-and-paper terminology, is not as fun to some players as it is to others.
2024.10.19 – 2024.10.26
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