G-pinions

I am probably the most masochistic gamer out there. No, I haven't rigged my controllers to give me a little extra punishment with each rumble, but I have been known to engage in a few acts that are far from typical gamer behavior. Check out these three atrocities I have forced upon myself in the last month alone: first, I played through all forty hours of Paper Mario 2. When you factor in the length and almost hypnotic redundancy, this is probably the worst RPG I have ever played all the way through. If you're keeping track of my all-time least favorite RPGs, Paper Mario 2 has now knocked Granida II off the perch it held strong for almost five years. Final Fantasy VIII still comes in as the worst RPG I've ever had the misfortune of playing - I could only make it five hours into that. From torturing myself with Paper Mario, I went down the Gandhi path of masochism: resisting the urge to buy Timesplitters: Future Perfect simply because Electronic Arts is evil. You have no idea how much it's killing me to know that Nick owns the game but is still playing freaking Halo 2 every night.

The most recent act of pure self-hatred is my current jaunt through Knights of the Old Republic II. I can hear the gasps rising from my fellow readers already, and I haven't even posted this column yet. Yes, KotOR II, a game I penciled in as the best of 2004 after my first 10 hours, is turning out to be quite an ordeal. What makes this a masochistic experience is that, despite the huge flaws proudly flaunting their ineptness, I am still enjoying this game fully. I am a sick, sick man.

While complaints of bugs and glitches in the original Star Wars RPG ran rampant through the internet, I was lucky enough to play through the title nearly unscathed. There was the occasional dialog glitch - removing some of my choices so I was forced to do things I would not have normally done - but as a whole it was as solid as any other epic adventure out there. Somehow, using the same basic engine as the original, Obsedian has butchered that outdated mold so much that my Xbox literally creaks and groans as it attempts to spit out the garbled code.

Here are a few examples of the torture I go through trying to get to the meaty parts of the game. A few weeks ago, after loading up a saved game, I found that none of my party members were present. I assumed it was supposed to be that way - there are certain moments of both KotOR I and II where you are forced to go it alone. So alone I went, to take on a whole room full of Mandolorians. Those are the brutish rebels with a penchant for throwing grenades and shooting high tech guns. After using most of my medkits and all of my grenades, as well as more than an hour of my precious time, I finally defeated the lot of them. It was a heroic battle to be sure, one I was proud of at the time. As the story continued to unfold I realized with some surprise that my precious party members were not returning to me. It was only then that I realized the game had made a mistake - my party was removed without my knowledge even though they were more than welcome to join in the melee. Making the game ultra hard by dwindling my firepower to a mere one third of what it should be is quite lame.

While that was only one section of the game, there is a much larger problem which unfortunately is present throughout the journey - the AI. More specifically, the artificial intelligence of my party members. Yesterday, I went through a mini mission killing slavers who illegally boarded my beautiful ship, the Ebon Hawk. Fighting took place in relatively tight quarters, but that is no excuse for what I witnessed. My teammates simply refused to fight. I would manually switch to them, order them to attack a certain enemy in a certain way and then realize, with horror, that no one was actually helping me. I would switch back to the characters and find them running around in circles. Or they would simple be standing there, watching me get beat to hell, while they refused to fire a gun.

This breach of AI ethics is a recurring problem throughout the game. I'm on the forest fields of some moon at this point and cannot make my third party member, an aging Jedi woman, actually fight with me and my partner. At the end of every battle I see her casually walking towards me, her sword never even drawn.

The game is so fantastic in most other areas that horrible glitches like these are just so frustrating. I want to just play through this game in peace, but the designers simply would not make it that easy. Why couldn't this game be delayed a few months to work out all the kinks? Except for Mario, which should have a new title every summer, and sports games, no title should have a sequel sooner than two years after its predecessor. Sadly, as much as I believe those words, I will gladly buy KotOR III this Christmas if it happened to materialize.