Fun Stuff > CLIKC
The Games We Hate
Catfish_Man:
Castlevania X. I recently tried it out, having loved the atmosphere and gameplay of much of the rest of the series, and proceeded to die like 18 times in a row on the first section of the first level.
Scytale:
Johnny, I can see where you are coming from and the short answer for me is there's nothing wrong with it, but I think the reverse rule applies equally well. For every Sgt Pepper's type of album that you enjoy how many other seemingly derivative and less inspired albums do you enjoy. Not every painting needs to be the Mona Lisa.
Half Life 2 completely missed the mark in my opinion it lacked the kind of subtly required to pull of a successful multi-genre game. The physics puzzle were so jarring it disrupted the whole flow of the game and destroyed what ever atmosphere the disjointed storyline and the action was designed to create. I know I'm not the only one complaining about this as someone else in this thread has also gripped about things like the Cinder Block puzzles etc. I honestly feel half life 2 would have been a better game had they left this element of it out, especially all the messing around with the gravity gun, the game would have been better served playing to it's strength's, which I feel derive from its FPS roots.
To use your literature example, compare "The Da-Vinci Code" to "Foucault's Pendulum" theres a remarkable difference in the depths and the scope of the latter. Half-life 2 lacks that kind of serious depth to it, the puzzles are just thrown in as superficial window dressing, it just a cheap attempt at trying to fake depth. I think the developers were more interested in trying to show off their game engine then preserve the games atmosphere.
Compare this to a game like "Zork Nemesis", which is brilliant one of my favorite games ever, that game took an established series, one known for it's silliness and humor and pushed it in an entirely new direction (one they unfortunately didn't stick to with the next Zork game :( ), It combined, horror, with adventure, puzzle solving and complex character development and it had the required subtly to not impact upon the game play, the atmosphere that game had was amazing. One of the few games I've ever become almost completely immersed in.
Of Half Life 2 is insanely popular and has it's fans but I don't count myself as one of them.
Dimmukane:
Well, enough on that then, any other games you hate, Scytale?
Inlander:
There's only one game I've ever hated so much that I deleted it from my computer. The name of that vile abomination was Icewind Dale II.
I'd been playing a lot of first-person shooters recently, and I was in a mood for a role-playing game. I'd seen snippets of the original Icewind Dale a few years back and liked what I'd seen, but this being the world of computer games "a few years back" means that when I went into the shops it was nowhere to be seen. So I picked up a copy of Icewind Dale II instead.
It started pretty promisingly: it looked nice, it had a good detailed world with lots of stuff you could pick up and play with, and best of all it had a third-person perspective (I don't like first-person R.P.G.s so much, it's a personal thing). But all too soon it became clear that the game was going to fail spectacularly on all of its initial promise. Now, I'm not afraid to admit that I never finished the game - but I did play a substantial amount of it, and it became painfully, excruciatingly clear that the whole game was just going to consist of screen after screen of obscenely linear paths littered with a string of tedious and repetitive hack 'n' slash fights. Again, and again, and a-fucking-gain. I can only assume that this worthless excuse for a game was never play-tested, because nobody in their right mind would have played it and then released it, thinking that they were delivering anything that even remotely resembled an enjoyable or entertaining or rewarding experience. Memo game designers: if you can't think of a better way to increase the difficulty and challenge in a game than just throwing more and more and tougher and tougher enemies at the gamer, maybe you should start thinking of doing something else with your life. If you're so ashamed of the extreme linearity of the pathways in your game that you try to hide them by burying them in pretty landscapes, maybe you should reconsider your chosen career.
Never, ever go near this game. Not unless you find anger and frustration at the idiocy and ineptitude and laziness of humanity to be a rewarding gaming experience.
ScrambledGregs:
You must be the only person in the world who went into the Icewind Dale series thinking it would be anything but a dungeon hack fest. I remember when the original game was released on the same day as Diablo II and everybody ignored the shit out of it. I think the original was a pretty good BioWare style RPG though it was designed from the beginning to be like a more action/dungeon hacky version of Baldur's Gate.
In all fairness, though, Diablo II did it much better, though Icewind Dale is arguably more "sophisticated" because it's based on a pen and paper RPG. Whatever.
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