My options this afternoon were to continue playing Lair or to watch Mansquito on the Sci-fi channel. Given the first hour of my experience with Lair, I opted for the more exciting and satisfying entertainment choice: Mansquito.

Mansquito is a bad movie about an escaped convict which is accidentally exposed to radioactive mosquitoes and transforms into a giant Mansquito. He had a giant proboscis and everything. It was gross, especially when he ate the insides of his girlfriend.

The giant mosquito man dies in the end, of course.

My original commentary:

In Lair, you play some sort of dragon riding soldier, frequently referred to in game as a "burner". Controlling the dragon's flight is done by waggling the six-axis controller which, while initially intriguing is actually super annoying. The controls are squishy and imprecise which makes directing the dragon an exercise in frustration.

The game is beautiful to look at when you're not playing because, when you're playing, you don't really have time to look at the game. Instead, you'll probably spent a fair amount of time looking at the ground or the walls or the ceilings because the controls are so screwy that you won't be able to help smashing into them.

I could say more things about Lair, but that would require that I spend more time on it, which I do not wish to do.

After much complaining from, well, everyone, Lair's developers have finally seen fit to patch in an alternative control mechanism. You can now use the analog sticks on the PS3 controller to control your dragon. Funny thing, as it turns out, the control scheme isn't the problem. The problem is that the game just sucks. Lair suffers from the same fate as do many of the products of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation: fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws. You put in so much effort trying to convince it to do what it's supposed to do that you utterly fail to realize that what's it's supposed to do is stupid.

Like many others, I had assumed that using the analog stick would get rid of the overall squishyness of the controls. I was wrong. Controlling the little beasty is still an unmitigated disaster. It's squishy and unresponsive. But hey, at least I can play it now. Turns out, I still don't want to. The interface, not content with being difficult to control, doesn't provide me the information I need to complete the (idiotic) missions I'm assigned. It's virtually impossible to tell who are the good guys and who are the bad guys, and there's no help in tracking down where they're supposed to be. Sure, there is a giant arrow in the sky, but it doesn't help. At best, it's a vague approximation of the direction of the action. At worst, it will actually send you in the wrong direction. Is it pointing up? Or is it pointing North? I can't tell.

And now that I can play it without the insidious controller waggling business, I got a littler further than before before I got fed up. It's important to note that only the flight-waggling controls have been changed. You still have to waggle the stupid controller in fights. And you still have to waggle it to do a 180 (which never works, by the way). Even so, the overall effect is that the game has gone from unplayably stupid to (just barely) playable but still gimmicky and stupid.

If the game was at all interesting I would, at this point, be willing to overlook the stupid controls. But it's not, and I won't. One of the first missions is to keep some trebuchets from taking down a wall, behind which some quantity of food is being safely stored. Um. Hello? Aren't the bad guys using dragons? Can't they fly? Over the wall? Seriously, after examining that mission, I realized that the mission designers were (are?) idiots. Sorry guys, I calls em like I sees em. A later mission involved shooting some eyeballs on a tower and then flying into the tower to destroy stuff. Aside from the controls, the frame rate, and the piss poor camera making that particular mission impossibly frustrating, there just doesn't seem to be much point to it all. It doesn't make any sense. The only apparent effect of destroying the tower's innards is that the tower's innards are destroyed.

Whoopdeedooo!

The mission which finally did me in, though, is the one where you have to protect the giant mantas (which are apparently some sort of ginormous pack animal) from an enemy assault. First: the lack of information in the interface made it virtually impossible to find the enemy dragons. The stupid arrow had me going all over the place, meanwhile, my mantas are being exploderized. Boom goes the giant airborne fish! Must be filled with hydrogen. Second: giant mantas? Seriously? The best thing you can come up with is a giant airborne fish? After failing to protect my giant airborne fish friends, I realized that I neither knew nor cared why I was doing it,

And that pretty much sums up my experience with Lair: don't know why. Don't care. Maybe there's a rerun of Mansquito I could watch.