malkav11

I really hate it when games put you through several probable-death sequences all in a row without any kind of save or checkpoint or anything in between. It puts me in a situation where I have to perform perfectly all the way through or risk getting stymied back at one of the earlier sequences that I had already beaten at least once. A good example of this is one of the early levels in the original Devil May Cry.

First you fight this giant lava spider boss. If you survive that (which I did maybe half the time), then you fight off some nondescript regular enemies and then trigger a miniboss (which becomes a normal enemy later on, if never common) that's a living shadow. That would usually kill me, but every so often I'd actually manage to do that in also, in which case one hit the main boss of the level, a demonic swordsman named Nelo Angelo, who invariably kicked my ass from here until Sunday. And then retrying I'd probably die to the lava spider or the shadow.

I mention this because Conker just threw me into a similar situation (actually, there's been more than one). I defeated the Great Mightypoo, then I went and cleared the Bats Tower (foul-mouthed horny cogs and gears, bats seeking revenge for their friend's firey death, and a brass-balled boiler, among other things...but mostly several tiers of balance beams and tricky jumps with a wrong step meaning either death and respawn at the bottom...or loss of health and restart from a few rungs down.). But now I have to navigate a gauntlet of multiple sections, all of which kill you instantly if you do something even the slightest bit wrong. Fans, mostly. Sometimes I die on the first fan. Sometimes the second. Sometimes even the third. Every now and then I manage to get past all three fans and then die on the fan-floor beyond, or maybe even the rotating fan-bladed walkway leading to the ladder leading out of the section. Hoorah. Not fun. Not even slightly.

So I flipped back to Everblue 2, which is increasingly addictive, between the fish collecting and the musical instrument collecting and the shell collecting and the...well, you get the point. But there's more wrecks for me to explore now, and my equipment is better so I can do it more easily and grab bigger stuff. Also a salvage contest, a race, and an auction house have opened up , as well as an aquarium where I can simply watch the fish. I think I'd buy the game, except it's pretty nigh unavailable.