"Uncle Sean said a dirty Bertie". It's true. I did. In front of my five-year-old nephew. Let's put it in perspective though - this Scooby Doo game is pretty S-H-I-T. And if he doesn't hear it from me, he's going to pick it up in the playground.He got it for Christmas and it’s the first game he has ever played. When he asked me to get him past a hard bit, I grabbed the controller with glee. It should have been child’s play, but Scooby had a few surprises in store.
It’s not a terrible game, but it unfortunately possesses a who’s who of video game glitches. You hold up on the controller to climb a ladder, which is exactly what you hold at the top to climb back down again. If you so much as think about walking towards the camera, it whips around and the controls reverse. Every floor feels those on slippy-slidey ice worlds and Scooby Doo teeters across them like a dog walking on his hind legs, which to be fair, he is.
I’m on my umpteenth try when it happened. I had managed to get the glitchy toggling switch to trigger the timer. I had climbed the ladder of confusion and I’d crossed the bridge of slippery death. I could finally see the key I needed to grab, with twenty seconds left on the clock. We had never been this far before and it was terribly exciting, but we both groaned when we saw another ladder. I approached it with sweating palms. Resident Evil had nothing on the heady mixture of fear, powerlessness and frustration it induced.
I went up the ladder first time, then accidentally down again. Then up again, then stood at the top in triumph and slipped off. My nephew climbed on my back in panicked excitement and wailed in my ear while I hammered the button to reattach to the ladder, as the timer ticked down. That’s when it happened. I slowly got sucked into the wall.
So I said a Dirty Bertie. Several, in fact.
“What’s wrong with Scooby Doo?” my nephew wanted to know. He was trapped half in and half out of a wall, cycling animations, stuck in an infinite loop of spasmodic agony.
It’s a tough one to answer. ”Sometimes bad men make bad games?” It’s certainly what I used to think before I joined the industry. How could a team of twenty fail to notice that you can’t use the ladders that are everywhere? I liked to picture a studio full of bumbling idiots, struggling to make themselves a cup of tea in the morning, too busy not setting the building on fire to notice all these obvious problems.
Now having made some commercial games, I understand a bit more. Games made by larger teams spend most of their development so full of glitches that it obscures the gameplay. Occasionally a ray of light breaks through the clouds and you get to actually play it, and everyone crosses their fingers that it’s going to be good. Picture the awkward silence as a team discovers the mess their game has become, while they wait for the gold disc to burn. I guess it’s why so many games slip.
Behind the doors of every studio are the great unsung heroes of the videogame industry. The people who just try to make their games not bad. The graduate artist who tags every collision surface correctly, the diligent scripter who makes every trigger box the right size and the overworked lead programmer who takes the time to make the controls not just functional, but good. If all of these people do their job perfectly, then their work is never noticed, but any short cut will be mentioned in every review.
When it comes to licensed games like Scooby Doo!, it always surprises me to find that most have relatively small budgets. They certainly have a reputation for being low quality, and as an experienced gamer I know to steer clear, but parents presumably don’t. The “E for Everyone” ratings bracket is full of brightly coloured cash-ins like this one, with handling that is far more likely to drive a child to violence than Grand Theft Auto ever would.
On a budget game like this, cameras, controls and collision might all be the work of one person. That person is probably a programmer, he’s more than likely well aware of the problems and if someone would just give him a couple of weeks he could sort it all out. Every day he works he dies a little inside and if he knew that for some five-year-old it will be the first game they ever play, he’d probably leave the industry in the morning.
We made a pact when we started out that Joe Danger would always be playable, and we’d fix bugs as we found them. Focus is one of the benefits of a small team. Having said that, we’re trying to bring a build together today and plenty of problems have crept in. With four of us, there’s nowhere to hide. If our controls are loose, it’s Dave’s fault. If the collision is slidey or sticky, that’s Ryan and Grant. If the camera is terrible, then that’s me. Right now the camera transition when you reverse is flakey, it doesn’t look ahead enough when you are going fast, and I should really be fixing that rather than writing this.
In the end we turned off Scooby Doo! before my nephew saw a new side to me and instead I introduced a few of my old friends. “This little fella is Toad, that’s Koopa. Watch out for these guys, these are Goombas. That? That’s what we call a ground pound... Have a seat, we have so much to discuss.”