Intermission: Gish

I swear, this game was built to frustrate the player. At least, in the stages later on.

Having just got past the "7 planes of Henenna" stage (which, personally, whoever happens to beat that part of the game deserves a goddamn trophy and possibly a purple heart), and moving onto the Egyptian stage, I've come to the realization that Gish is hard and frustrating.

Not that that's entirely a surprise. This is a platformer, and by nature platformers have to have at least one level in every 5 or so that are frustratingly difficult.

But Gish takes it a step further by implementing a frustratingly difficult bit of platforming or a damn annoying puzzle every single level. For example, it literally took me a good day or two to get past level 3-3, and another day to get past 3-5 due to a brutal bit of platforming. Whats worse is that in the case of level 3-3, that godawful bit of platforming was the very end of the level. Yeah, thank god for that, right?

Well, when you die you get catapulted back to the beginning of the level. Do that enough times to the player (as it happened to me) and he or she will start questing their own self worth and, more importantly, wonder why they're playing your game at all.

Another thing that pisses me off about Gish is the implementation of "lives".
Some of you older readers may remember lives from the old days of arcade gaming where, if they ran out, it was game over.

Well, when you die in Gish your off to the beginning of the level. Same thing happens when you run out of lives. There's no visible disadvantage to running out of lives, and you get a batch of five fresh from the game's oven every time you run out, which just raises the question of why the hell they're there in the first place.

It would make sense if you had checkpoints, and every time you ran out of lives you got sent back to the beginning of the level, but dying normally sent you back to the last checkpoint. But that doesn't happen in Gish, so really it's a mind bogglingly confusing feature that has no purpouse.