Platforming's Problems with Propellants

I'm a fan of platforming in adventure games like Assassin's Creed, Tomb Raider, and most recently Uncharted. Controlling someone who can support the weight of their body and a ridiculous amount of weapons and ammo is impressive to say the least, and those time when you just barely make a jump, or you have to hurry while your ancient handholds continue to crumble, is truly a heart stopper. But then there are times where you have to really wonder who the heck came up with these intricate puzzles and what sort of person they thought would reach them.

This thought came to me when I was playing Uncharted 2. There's a level where you have to climb hundreds of feet in the air in order to complete an ancient puzzle that has broken down. And this isn't something with ladders - he's scaling it using pieces of stone that have conveniently made a climbing surface that would only appeal to the most die-hard indoor rock climbers. For an idea of what I'm talking about, fast forward to 1:20 to see the scale and insanity of what this guy is climbing.




Game are full of instances like this. Whether by design or circumstance, these games are packed with these intricate climbing puzzles with wholly unrealistic ways of unlocking a single door. There are two major problems I see with things like this in video games, as well as movies like National Treasure. The first is the complete insanity of thinking that these would somehow weed out the "unworthy," but that's an entirely different tangent. I'd like to talk about the problem presented by relying on handholds, spinning platforms, and pressure switches to protect a magical artifact that, honestly, would be better protected by hiding it Treasure Island style.

That obvious problem, of course, is jetpacks. As I was scaling yet another ridiculous wall without the aid of a rope, parachute, or safety net, I said what most people think on a daily basis. "If I had a jetpack or Inspector Gadget helicopter hat, this would be a piece of cake." I wouldn't have to dangle precariously over a 100 foot drop, cling to the "will they crumble?" stones of a castle, or go through the hassle of spending 10 minutes figuring out some goofy puzzle just to make a ladder release from a wall. I would flip a switch, conquer gravity, and circumvent an extravagant barrier that took years and years to build, and that's just assuming they got everything right the first time!

What would possess these ancient cultures to build such intricate security systems with the same, consistent fatal flaw? It's not like they just wanted to keep these things safe for a few years until their value increased. These people are protecting world-ending artifacts that could allow a single man the ability to conquer the world. This is, of course, proven by the fact that Nazis are somehow mentioned in like 75% of these stories.

And don't tell me that they couldn't fathom that we'd build jetpacks. I'll concede that they may not have foreseen the exact science, but the idea of flight wasn't alien to any of them. Many cultures features in these stories have someone who can fly, whether a man or a god. Not to mention all the stories of anthropomorphic birds who are often portrayed as troublemakers! Heck, these people likely knew animals could be trained - what's to stop someone from training a hawk to pull a dainty lever sitting in plain view?

Did no one once stop and think "Instead of making this easy for a pigeon to circumvent, what if we did something less, I don't know, insane, and instead focused our efforts on burying this freaking thing deep in the ground. Just for fun, what if we threw away the idea of leaving behind cute clues that would lead people directly to this dangerous thing?"

There are a myriad of ways they could protect things like this, and all of them can end with the object actually being protected.

• Create a hole in a mountain that goes deep underground, put the item at the bottom of the whole, collapse the earth on top of the item.
• Pick the most absolute random spot in the jungle or desert. Dig a hole. Bury the item. Walk away and tell no one.
• Lava
• Smelt the item in to some large piece of metal and discard it along with a bunch of other metals in the blacksmith's garbage can. When people come digging around 4,000 years later, no one is going to suspect the hunk of useless metals sitting with all the other ones just like it.

Basically what I'm saying is that while it creates eye candy, ancient civilizations should have spent less time building intricate puzzles and more time planning for the future. Earthquakes, floods, tornadoes... there are so many things in nature that could have destroyed part of these puzzles, potentially opening the way for someone to bypass all that nonsense, or even forever sealing off something that was supposed to be found by a "worthy" person.

And don't even get me started on what would happen if a corporation decided to take time to properly excavate these places instead of having a lone wolf with a time crunch make a mess of everything!

See you tomorrow!

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