After navigating through the console friendly next-gen menu, I finally unlocked a new achievement..
Are you one of those PC gamers living in the past where games came out with an option to save anywhere, or just having an ability to create a new save file without setting up a next-gen SAVE GAME SLOT?
Bah! You, yeah, YOU right there. The "PC" gamer. You disgust me.
I was once like you all. I used to think that there was no need for "Press any key to continue" splash screens in-games. I even made a mistake of thinking that a save game system couldn't be made complicated since it was just.. well.. a save a game system. I mean, you press Escape, select Save Game, then select a slot where you enter the name of the save.. and VIOLA!
But no. What games like Resident Evil 4, Devil May Cry 4 and now, Ninja Blade, have shown me is that the save-game system used by PC games in the past was WAY too simple. Forget save-games, the game GUI itself in these next-gen console games is now ten times more fun navigating through. It's like a mini-game in itself.
All this time, all companies like id Software and Valve had to do was to give us an option to select one out of 3.. that's right, not 1, not 2, BUT THREE SAVE SLOTS, which will automatically be used to save everything you do in-game - all your progress - just like that. Sure it's just the good ol' Autosave feature used in most PC friendly games (which acts like a BACKUP save).. but in Ninja Blade, Autosave IS the last save you'll ever make. Genius. Don't worry about anything getting corrupted and loosing all that progress. That will never happen to anyone in this planet, or on Mars.
Navigating the menu in console games like DMC, RE4/5.. NINJA BLADE, is so much fun. For example..
I fondly remember the time I had to press A/B.. and I don't mean on my gamepad, I mean on my keyboard, in Ninja Blade to select an option or to cancel. I remember the time when instinctively I pressed the Escape key to cancel an option or go back to main menu or heck, just any menu before the one I was staring at. What a fool I was. Escape key doesn't exist. It's all about As and Bs in the console generation.
But NO.
Developers weren't happy about the gamepad friendly magic in the main menu only. They decided to give the PC gamers a genius mix of console and keyboard control scheme in-game, during gameplay..
You see, I was having too much fun figuring out the main GUI, but decided to move on to the gameplay. This is when I realised that designing games around keyboards and mouse can be such a challenging task for console developers.
Ninja Blade developers wanted to make us laugh, make us smile. Those crazy funny developers and their silly jokes, haha. You see, I laughed when the gamepad I was using (no, it wasn't the fancy 360 gamepad, it was the Logitech Rumblepad, which you would expect most PC gamers to have over a frakin 360 gamepad but nvm, I am getting off the track here) wasn't actually referred to at all in-game, during a thousand and one quick time events which make up like 40% of the game.
This is how developers treated me, a lowly PC gamer in this next-gen console port:
"Wanna press 1 key on your gamepad? (oops, I mean the universally accepted A key on gamepad as in 360, silly me). Wanna press it? Well TOO BAD PC GAMER.. YOU.. YOU OLD-GEN OCTOPUS. Instead, you will have to press the.. SHIFT key. Ha Ha, didn't see that coming did ya? You were expecting us to show a big flashing "1" or "A" instead of [SHIFT] during that quick time event, didn't you? Well, too bad. Guess you just need to stop gaming on PC and get a better next-gen system where we will be releasing five $10 DLC's soon."
I could go on and on about the optimization issue which requires setting the shadow quality to LOW from.. AVERAGE? Yeah, not Medium or High, but there are 2 options for some settings and those two are Average or Low. So my guess is that even the developers knew that the consolish Average setting would make the game lag for the whole world using PC to play games. So they gave us the appropriate Low option from the Average console experience.
Needless to say. I uninstalled the game and burned my HDD to make sure all evidence of me ever having installed this game is erased. The only evidence would be this review.. which hopefully will be deleted the day Gamespot stops labeling their crappy console reviews as PC just cause they are too cheap to afford a good gaming rig like the rest of us.
You also might wanna steer clear of the console crowd busy reviewing games on PC section on Gamespot and labeling all console ports as BEST GAME EVER OMG LOLLOLOL I POOP!
:(