THESE FORUMS NOW CLOSED (read only)
Fun Stuff => CLIKC => Topic started by: ScrambledGregs on 26 Apr 2007, 19:04
-
Use this thread to vent about games you hate: games that should or could have been great that weren't, games that are flat out awful, or games you just don't see why other people froth over it.
I hate Vagrant Story. Vagrant Story is the ultimate example of a game that I wish was a movie because the story, music, and graphics are incredible. Unfortunately, you have to actually play Vagrant Story, which is an experience so tedious, frustrating, and arbitrary that I can't believe it got such high review scores. To be fair, the basic gameplay is really fun: being able to aim at certain body parts and to time attack/defense skills into chains is a really interesting idea, and the basic platforming/puzzle elements are all done extremely well. The problem comes in the gameplay that is laid over this: the Risk system, the weapon system, and the crafting.
The Risk system is designed to discourage button mashing, plain and simple--this isn't so bad, but there are much better ways of doing this. Any attack you perform in the game increases your Risk meter. When it starts to get over 25 or so (on a scale out of 100), you begin to miss attacks more often and do less damage. The Risk meter goes down when you stand still and do nothing, and there are items to lower Risk, but what's the fucking point?? As I said, there are much better ways of discouraging or eliminating button mashing in an action RPG, and the Risk system is terrible and irritating. If I can just open a menu and use an item everytime my Risk gets too high, why even have it in the game at all?? You'll either spend too much time standing still waiting for your Risk to go down, or you'll constantly be opening the menu to use items, which makes the gameplay molasses slow.
The weapon system wouldn't be such a problem if it wasn't so complicated. There are three types of weapons (blunt, piercing, and sharp edge) and on top of that there are various elemental allignments. Not a big deal; other games have elements and different weapon types. The problem is that the element and weapon types are absolutely crucial to the battle system. When you run into, say, a Fire Elemental boss, you can spend hours doing chains of 3 to 4 HP damage attacks over and over (and then tediously getting your Risk back down) or you can switch to a water elemental weapon. What's that you say, you don't have a water elemental weapon?? Well uh I guess you're shit out of luck. Even assuming you do, having to open the menu to switch weapons and/or attach/de-attach gems to affect elements slows down the gameplay. This is a game that so badly needed some kind of ring menu to quickly cycle through items and weapons I can't believe they didn't implement one after play testing. I know it can't be out of laziness , so I can only assume it was a design choice, albeit an extremely poor one.
Finally, the crafting system. Around about the late 90s onward, RPGs started to have systems wherein you could 'customize' or 'combine' various items, weapons, and/or armor to create newer, better items. The problem is that they usually give you no indication of what the result will be, leading to lots of re-loads or time spent tearing apart and re-assembling items over and over. However, in most games they are but an optional thing for the hardcore to fool with; witness Star Ocean 2, which has all kinds of item creation and customization crap, but you can easily beat the game without touching any of it. Not so for Vagrant Story: weapon and item crafting are mandatory. In fact, Vagrant Story is the absurd climax of this concept. There are so many stats and numbers to keep track of, it's hard to know whether your weapons and armor are going to improve through the process or not. Rather than playing the game and having fun, you will spend chunks of time fucking around with crafting until you can get the right weapon/armor combos to defeat the bosses.
I can see how the game might appeal to some people because it is a unique experience, combining an action/stealth game with lots of strategy and hardcore jRPG elements. However, for the other 99% of the population, Vagrant Story should rightfully forever stand as a game that squandered all its potential by trying to be unique and complex but ended up being frustrating and needlessly complicated.
-
Two games for the list: Advent Rising and Dreamfall: The Longest Journey (which I don't hate at all)
Advent Rising had a wonderful concept: Hire a prolific sci-fi writer to pen your story, superpowers + third person shooter, branching storylines that span over a trilogy.
Instead, the story, although quite nice on its own (probably better in its entirety, which we will never see) was panned as being too Halo-like. The gameplay was pretty fun, but only after leveling up a bit, and was also panned as derivative. There was also this thing where you would warp-tackle, and it basically worked wonders on anything that wasn't a boss or vehicle, that kinda made it really easy. The two difficulty levels weren't very different from each other, either. The branching storyline didn't branch much. It basically didn't matter which of the two possibilities you picked, the same thing happened with both options, just to different characters. And to top it off, the framerate was somewhat unstable, and the game could be beaten in as little as 4 hours.
On the plus side, the soundtrack was pretty good (even though this too suffered from glitchery, where it would cut volume or drop completely for no apparent reason). It also had great art direction, in my opinion. But due to lack of team members and good marketing, all sequels have been effectively canceled.
Dreamfall I enjoyed immensely, with my only qualm being the fighting system, which thankfully didn't come up too often. I am also of the opinion that the entire Trilogy should be redone in cinema. That's really all I have to say about it.
-
Superman Returns. I know that Superman has a legacy of having the hands down worst games ever and I had high hopes for this new one to finally break the mold and lead us into a glorious time of Superman games that are actually good
instead it made me feel empty, actyally empty, inside. The camera was terrible, flying sucked and was nothing like I hoped, and all you did was beat people up. I know that this is pretty much what Superman does, but he does it with a finesse that this game missed completely.
the only good thing that I found about this game was that I got to play it for free when I rented Marvel Ultimate Alliance
-
PLUS SIDE: Lack of green fog.
-
I was typing this great big rant about how much I hate Oblivion but just got too angry and deleted everything.
-
Half Life 2,
*begin rant*
This game is the single most overhyped peice of crap I've seen or played, I may be biased because I'm not a FPS fan but seriously why the hell is this game praised so much.
The storyline makes no sense, wtf I'm trying to escape a city, there are aliens or something, some crazy scientist gives you a gravity gun??? then wtf Zombies and a crazy preacher. Never got any further then that because it was pissing me off too much. If your going to try and integrate a storyline into a shoot em up make sure it makes sense. Seriously a gravity gun friggin ridducoulus purely an excuse to show off the "physics engine"
Thats my third complaint. Your running for you life shooting up people then BAM you get to one of these stupid physics puzles they've inserted just to show off their game engine. You're in the middle of a jetski chase then you've got to get up and start stacking together barrallels to make a ramp, lame. If you want to put puzzles into your game don't have them detract from the action please, look at Quake perfect example, there were lots of puzzles in there, had to hit switches in a set order shoot targets to open doors etc and they didn't detratct form the action at all in fact there I've said it Quake is about 300* better then halflfe 2, none of this nonsense with a storyline just had you in a castle blasting away monster with a fucking nailgail, no messing around with gravity guns no crappy physics puzzles, just non stop action. If you want multiplayer play Unreal Tournement that has interesting weapons and doesn't use that stupid source thing.
On that subject, thats final nail in the coffin the damnable DRM of the Source software, in order to play HL2 you need to enable it online and have this thing running in the background all the time. The thing always forces you to download new patches all the time. Won't let you play with the version 1 software on the actual half life 2 cd's.
If your someone like me who doesn't normal have Windows on their pc, but set it up specifically because every one was raving about this game, played the game for about 3 hours got pissed off and un-installed it and Windows. Then two years later decide maybe you were a bit harsh and should try again only to have to sit through hours worth of valves patches, (why oh why does it patch so slowly???) Just to play the damn thing it's not worth it.
*end rant*
Seriously
If you want to play a good FPS play the original Quake or if you want multiplayer play Unreal Tournement both games are a lot better.
-
They should have left halflife 2 at just that Route Canal chapter (the first one, and the one that's in the demo). I think they were trying to be mysterious with the story, but did that but leaving information out rather than giving you hints. Steam is what's stopping me from giving it another try. The software hates me and gets more and more like just a platform to sell you shit with time and I really don't have the bandwidth for this.
-
The whole reason Valve were hyping episodic content was "delivering content more frequently, but in smaller pieces." Really? The amount of time between episodes one and two puts that myth to bed. (Though I did like HL2, myself.)
Doom 3. How can you not hate that piece of shit? Quake 4 as well. Way to fail, iD, way to fail.
-
I gotta agree with you on the Doom3 and Quake4 front. It's like they said on Penny Arcade: iD knows how to make a really great, solid game engine, but the games themselves are like a fourteen year old's high school notebook. "...and when you turn the corner, there's a GIANT SKELETON! with ROCKET LAUNCHERS on his shoulders! and INVISIBLE SKIN! WOO SCARY!"
It's like the best idea they have is variations of ADAM from Buffy. Yeah. that didn't work too well there, either. A nightmare mix of demon/human/cyborg isn't that scary! Cut it out!
I also, sadly, have to echo my dissatisfaction with Half-Life 2. Yeah, it's got a kinda decent story, but cliffhangers are never cool. Also, it may just be my crappy 5-year-old PC, but the load times are horrible! I have literally been able to do various home repair projects waiting for the next areas to load. I went back to play it last weekend, and got 5 shelves hung up during the dead times. And that was just until Ravenholm!
As far as good, fun games where you shouldn't even give a crap about what's going on otherwise, I like UT2k4, but this isn't about games we like, it's games we hate. That claim goes towards two games that get the "thank god it was a rental!" award. Daikatana for the N64 (I can't blame Daikatana on this. I knew it was going to be awful, but I had to see what the hype was about), and Superman 64 (this turd needed to die young).
-
Perfect Weapon for the PS1
Saga Frontier 1
Whats wrong with Obvilion? Can you summarize your big rant McTag?
-
If you're curious about the story behind the Half-Life series, just google it. It's basically a rewrite of 1984. I enjoyed the game though, I've beaten it 5 times, was briefly addicted to CS:S, and I plan on buying the Xbox 360 version as well.
And I'm assuming McTaggart is a Morrowind fan, based on his avatar. I wouldn't know what that's like, I never played more than three hours into it because by the time I finally got around to it I just had other games I had planned on playing more anyways. So, not having that comparison always leaves me at odds with people who do.
Like Johnny, I'm also curious as to why you didn't like it, or what you may have thought Morrowind did better than Oblivion. If it really is that good, I might go back and play it this summer, since most of the games I want got pushed back until fall.
-
I don't know about Mctaggart's reasons for disliking it, but coming from someone who didn't like Morrowind either, I just thought Oblivion did a pretty shitty job of everything I wanted it to do well.
Radiant AI was ass, there seemed to be a total of 6 voice actors in the game, the leveling system is complete ass (both skills and the scaled leveling), every humans face looked like utter garbage and the game engine was horribly optimized. The game was also an action/adventure game with RPG elements, not an RPG. Minigames are also a poor way of doing skills, especially when they are as easily abusable and annoying as they are in Oblivion.
Command & Conquer Generals.
-
Suikoden IV. Every single game in this series has been a stroke of genius, with the exception of IV.
Whereas you had your original six party battle system, something you didn't often see, and in III they evolved the battle system further to incorporate the idea of the characters moving on the field of battle. IV scrapped all that and made it the same shit Final Fantasy ripoff system we've been using for the past like sixteen years. It somehow took this stale formula and made it worse.
The characters were all generic, boring or outright annoying. The only thing worse than a cast of six or seven useless and boring characters is a cast of 108 useless and boring characters. Seriously, collecting all 108 Stars of Destiny is usually one of the most engrossing and enjoyable parts of any Suikoden game due to the deep characterization and fun extra story you unlock, but this was just lame, redundant and time consuming. Also, I hope whoever came up with Snowe dies in a fire.
The most overwhelming and lame final bossfight EVER! I've played dozens of RPG's. I finished Chrono Cross, where you fight a frustrating offshoot of Lavos that's a pain to beat. I've finished Final Fantasy IX, where the final boss is never mentioned until you actually fight him. I've beaten Xenosaga, where the boss was so lame I can't even remember what it was. THIS was worse. It's a giant fucking crab that has nothing to do with anything that you fight after climbing a big fucking tower filled with redundant and annoying random battles. Fail.
Sailing = Teh suck.
The storyline was bland and cliche. Homage is fine, hitting your roots is fine, but repeating the same shit over and over is not.
The worst thing, though? It is a bad, bad game packed right in between four PHENOMENAL games. The original, straight through to III, each got subsequently better, in my opinion, and V was one of the best RPG's I have ever played. When it's got to compete against a track record like that, it's fucked.
A close second would be Blood Omen II. They basically took everything great about the Legacy of Kain series, threw it out the window and gave us this buggy, redundant piece of shit. The only thing it had going for it was the incredible voice acting that the Legacy of Kain series has maintained since the beginning.
-
I'll see what I can do with just dot points. Imagine some eloquent text around all this if you'd like.
I really, really enjoyed Morrowind. It's become my benchmark for what a single player roleplaying game should be. I still play it now. There are still new things now. Oblivion was a step backward in every respect bar shiny graphics and I suppose the combat system.
- The combat system still sucks. There are all these fancy moves you can do at higher skills, but it's rarely a better option than just going for the damage. What's worst is that they removed a lot of the specialisation and limitations that made Morrowind interesting and diverse. I liked that my assassin couldn't just pick up a claymore and be just as effective as though he'd been using one all his life. I liked that axes and maces were different. I LIKED MY GODDAMN SPEARS. They didn't do anything to fix how not fun it was when you got blobbed by multiple attackers. The new shiny moves that you can do, without having any group removal, lend themselves to one on one fights. The poisons were a nice addition, except that they applied to everything (I made myself only use them on daggers and arrows). The combat felt even less tactile than Morrowind's. It's too simple.
- The magic system was stripped bare. All those neat effects are gone. No chance to fail felt wrong, the staves felt wrong, casting with your weapons out felt wrong. It was way too simple.
- You can only enchant or make spells if you are high up in the mages guild, you can only sell stolen items if you're in the thieves guild or have some rediculously high mercantile skill. I do not want to be railroaded into a faction because I want to use a feature of the game.
- Lack of factions and lines of quests. Fighters, Thieves, Mages, Dark Brotherhood, Blades. Any others? There was that one where you get the little hut just north of lleyawin or whatever but I'm not sure if there was even a second quest for that (or if it affected anything at all). They went and made it too simple. This will tie in with the last point that I'll make.
- The interface treated me like I was six and was obviously built for the xbox (which translates to a crappy interface for the pc). It was made way too simple and tok much more effort do anything in.
- Fast travel and map markers. "You'll have to search the caves in the area to find the thing for the who cares", no I won't. I'll just go to where this little arrow is pointing. The fact that you never had to walk any real distance made the bits where you did have to walk seem more boring and tedious by comparison. Did you find yourself fast travelling from one section of the Imperial City to the next, even though you could almost see the door from where you stood? I didn't like being shown exactly what I had to do and exactly where to go. You never had to think; it was all too simple.
- The world was bland. I don't know what they did with all of the elder scrolls canon but it sure didn't end up in here. There was very little history and even less politics or grassroots movements that were afoot. All of the npcs just existed, they didn't interact with each other past little inane chats that never changed. Where there are interactions between characters and organisations there is only one side you can be on. You never get the other point of view. You never ever care. The main story seemed completely arbitrary to everything else in the world. The gods were pointless, I can't even remember who was who or who did what. The different regions never really seemed natural. There werent progressions, just that each city was from some other provence ('cept Skingrad and and the Imperial City). The fact that there were pretty much just large cities, and none of them seemed to have a point. Anvil was the only one that made sense, and if it was the single port in the whole provence and there were no other ways to get into there, why was it poor and run down? There was no atmosphere in the cities either, though Morrowind suffered a little (less) from this as well. Nothing was worth reading about and there were very few of the books that would be any good to you if there was. It lacked the immersion that I've really begun to crave from things I do with my time.
I'm fine with guided tours through oil rigs, but I don't need someone to hold my hand through the children's playground.
-
Boy, do I feel you on that first post.
Vagrant Story is the only game I've ever owned, but regret buying. For every reason listed above, that game was just horrible. And, yes the story was probably great, but I didn't have the patience to play the game to finish it. Utterly ridiculous the amount of micromanagement necessary to mess with the weapons in the game, just to try and fight something.
Worst combat system I've ever seen, and worst gameplay I've ever experienced.
-
Man, it's rare nowadays for me to enter a thread and so vehemently disagree with anyone's opinions, let alone those of more than one person.
Half-Life 2 is very firmly in the "fething rules!" section of my preferences, and shall forever remain them. It's an equisitely balanced FPS game with an excellent difficulty curve, a near-infinite supply of atmosphere and style, and characters who are actually CHARACTERS. You can damn near see Alyx Vance fighting back tears at a later point in the game.
Play it again. Stop. take the time. Pay attention to the dialogue. Feel confused? GOOD. You're supposed to be confused. You've been thrust headlong into a violent and unfamiliar world with no apparent ties to your previous experience, and the first time you see anything that's even remotely familiar, it's the face of one of your old colleagues who, moments ago, looked like he was about to make you feel a lot of pain for no apparent reason.
It's a perfect example of a modern shooter done properly, and there's a very good reason it's been riding high on the list of best games ever for three years.
-
I play marginally bad translated jRPGs like Final Fantasy Tactics and Xenogears to be confused. I don't want that kind of shit in a FPS, which is why I for one loved Doom 3. Yes the engine is better than the game, and juggling the flashlight sucked, but I literally hadn't played a console FPS since Goldeneye and Doom 3 on Xbox was like a new thing for me. As for Half Life 2, I played Half Life 1 back in the day and was left with no desire to continue with the series. If the FIRST GAME in your series is going to end on a cliffhanger, and it's going to take you nearly a decade to deliver a sequel, then go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut.
I tried to give Vagrant Story another chance today, and got slightly farther. I still feel the same, if not stronger. This game would be so fucking good if they would just take out half of the ideas, or at least make them optional. It kind of reminds me of the opposite of a Nippon Ichi game: it's much shorter and an action RPG, but all of the extra stuff is mandatory instead of optional. You can play through most of a Nippon Ichi game without messing around with all the uber equipment/character/level stuff whatsoever.
-
The thing that I loved about Oblivion was the huge world to walk through. Sometimes I just walk around in it for half an hour with no purpose, just to look at rocks and trees and things. I once spent five minutes on a rock watching a deer. If it had no story whatsoever, just monsters and shops, I still would've bought it for the full 60 bucks, because I had a lot of fun doing that. I know Morrowind has that too, but from what I played of it, the entire look of the world was somewhat darker and less interesting. Does it get better?
And I don't know if you've looked into Two Worlds, but it's larger than Oblivion, and is slightly more RPG-oriented. Before I post the link, be warned, the single player forces you to be a human male. The multiplayer, however, doesn't. There aren't as many character animations either, supposedly because of the larger area. I'm getting it, for the same reason I play Oblivion, but you might find this interesting.
http://www.2-worlds.com/#
-
The world is darker for sure, but I found it had a lot more to it. By the world though, I mean the terrain and the people and the lore. There'sso much more of it and it's so much more convincing too.
Two World: sure, I'll give it a shot.
-
Man, it's rare nowadays for me to enter a thread and so vehemently disagree with anyone's opinions, let alone those of more than one person.
Half-Life 2 is very firmly in the "fething rules!" section of my preferences, and shall forever remain them. It's an equisitely balanced FPS game with an excellent difficulty curve, a near-infinite supply of atmosphere and style, and characters who are actually CHARACTERS. You can damn near see Alyx Vance fighting back tears at a later point in the game.
Play it again. Stop. take the time. Pay attention to the dialogue. Feel confused? GOOD. You're supposed to be confused. You've been thrust headlong into a violent and unfamiliar world with no apparent ties to your previous experience, and the first time you see anything that's even remotely familiar, it's the face of one of your old colleagues who, moments ago, looked like he was about to make you feel a lot of pain for no apparent reason.
It's a perfect example of a modern shooter done properly, and there's a very good reason it's been riding high on the list of best games ever for three years.
I disagree completely here, I don't think Half Life 2 has any atmosphere at all, I'm too busy getting confused by the lame storyline and solving shitty physics puzzles to get immersed into the game.
If you want to play games with CHARACTERS play a RPG (Which I love), when I play a FPS I want to blow shit up.
No one (I'm talking about game designers) really gets this anymore and it pisses me off back when I used to play games a lot, as opposed to now where I rarely have the time, a FPS was something like Doom, Quake or Duke Nukem 3d, it was just you, your gun and a bunch of enemies between you and the exit. Sure the game engines weren't so hot (though I still like the original quake engine a lot). But the games were fun, the engines didn't get in the way of you enjoying the game, there were no shitty physics puzzles no storyline, you could sit down and with in 2 mintues you'd be straight into the action.
-
Man, it's rare nowadays for me to enter a thread and so vehemently disagree with anyone's opinions, let alone those of more than one person.
Half-Life 2 is very firmly in the "fething rules!" section of my preferences, and shall forever remain them. It's an equisitely balanced FPS game with an excellent difficulty curve, a near-infinite supply of atmosphere and style, and characters who are actually CHARACTERS. You can damn near see Alyx Vance fighting back tears at a later point in the game.
Play it again. Stop. take the time. Pay attention to the dialogue. Feel confused? GOOD. You're supposed to be confused. You've been thrust headlong into a violent and unfamiliar world with no apparent ties to your previous experience, and the first time you see anything that's even remotely familiar, it's the face of one of your old colleagues who, moments ago, looked like he was about to make you feel a lot of pain for no apparent reason.
It's a perfect example of a modern shooter done properly, and there's a very good reason it's been riding high on the list of best games ever for three years.
I disagree completely here, I don't think Half Life 2 has any atmosphere at all, I'm too busy getting confused by the lame storyline and solving shitty physics puzzles to get immersed into the game.
If you want to play games with CHARACTERS play a RPG (Which I love), when I play a FPS I want to blow shit up.
No one (I'm talking about game designers) really gets this anymore and it pisses me off back when I used to play games a lot, as opposed to now where I rarely have the time, a FPS was something like Doom, Quake or Duke Nukem 3d, it was just you, your gun and a bunch of enemies between you and the exit. Sure the game engines weren't so hot (though I still like the original quake engine a lot). But the games were fun, the engines didn't get in the way of you enjoying the game, there were no shitty physics puzzles no storyline, you could sit down and with in 2 mintues you'd be straight into the action.
Download the Coastline To Atmosphere mod. It's still got a few puzzles, but I haven't come across a physics puzzle yet. It's a lot of run and gun type stuff, you actually might like it, despite it's lack of polish.
That being said, you're sort of at odds with the rest of the FPS community. Most of the other FPS players want something new, or something more complex than aim-and-shoot-and-jump-and-get-this-keycard. You're not alone, there are quite a few people who still love Doom and Quake, but most of the other FPS players have decided to move on, hence the change in the way FPS games are played nowadays. Like Switchblade said, it's a Modern shooter. Modern shooters don't try to be as basic as Duke Nukem. To be honest, those kinds of games have almost stopped being made...the most recent one was I think SiN:Vengeance, which ironically was made with the same technology as Half-Life 2, and that was released in late 2005.
-
Stick to Rocket Arena if all you want is to rail somebody.
The rest of us want our games to tell a story.
-
Bah, play fucking Painkiller if you want run and gun. It's the only game I've played in recent years that comes anywhere near matching DOOM 1, DOOM 2 or Duke Nukem 3D (all of which I play regularly) in that respect.
I'll still regularly play through Half-Life and it's sequel for the great story and atmosphere though. They are basically the only modern shooters that I enjoy.
-
I have to come in here and take a stand against the Oblivion hate to say:
Morrowind.
I should not have to walk for fucking ever out to the middle of nowhere with no direction or method of making it go faster just to complete a stupid goddamned quest. Maybe it gets better. I don't know.
IT IS TOO GODDAMN TEDIOUS.
-
I spent more time in Morrowind creating characters and trying to be a dick to townspeople than I ever did actually playing it. The game is non-linear to the point it feels like a MMORPG you're accidentally playing offline.
-
I have to come in here and take a stand against the Oblivion hate to say:
Morrowind.
I should not have to walk for fucking ever out to the middle of nowhere with no direction or method of making it go faster just to complete a stupid goddamned quest. Maybe it gets better. I don't know.
IT IS TOO GODDAMN TEDIOUS.
To be fair, I hate them both equally.
-
Morrowind was enthralling for awhile then I didn?t play it for about a week and so I?d forgotten what quests I was doing so I checked my journal and it was a mess. No quest log, just a dated journal. Half the quests I had weren?t even in there. I freed some Cat things from a mine but they never ran away and they still reported me for stealing mine ore. Then Oblivion came out.
I started the game and it seemed fun and basically the first thing I did was head into the arena which I easily conquered...at level 2. Seriously I was barely out of the womb and yet I was so awesome? I didn't understand that. After that I thought hmmm big world what will I do next? I can?t decide! The game is too big and without a finish line in sight I stopped playing. I enjoy the fact it?s not blatantly linear but i appreciate SOME direction. Bah.
They better make Fallout 3 awesome.
-
With the (usually) excellent directions given by whoever gave you the quest and the paper map (Morrwind's paper map is the single greatest accompaniment to a game I've ever seen. It's damn near perfect in it's accuracy and detail. If you're told to head south, then turn southeast at the two tall rocks you can look on the map and find what you are after southeast of the two tall rocks drawn just south of where you are) I have never gotten hopelessly lost. The way it didn't hold your hand and treated you like you could think for yourself was what kept me coming back.
I liked the walking, it made it much more immersive and made it feel like a role playing game rather than an action game with pretty crappy action mechanics.
The journal is much nicer with the Tribunal expansion (and I think they learnt their lesson for any future games)
"The game is too big"
You obviously look for something different in a game than I do. More expansive is better, provided the world is coherent and accepts you into it. Rather than 'what do I want to do?' try first 'who is my character' and then 'what would they do?'. Morrowind was a role playing game where you so almost had the ability to actually play the role of your character. In oblivion you could kill shit I suppose.
What I'm hoping for in Fallout 3 is the same turn based, hex based combat that two had (this was excellent), a way to finish the story without taking a life, movements to join that change the world (or fail but leave a bit of an impact on you or the world, I would love a game where you can't save the world), no good/evil dichotomy, relationships between factions and characters that change depending on events, a chance to not even begin the main quest and the two most important ones; 1) History, backstory and intrigue. History from more than one painfully objective point of view. Rather than information about the past, information and opinions about the present that happened before now. I want a world to lose myself in that is believable. 2) No goddamn handholding and the ability to solve problems the way my character would do it.
It's not gonna happen though, they're going to make a game that will sell four billion copies rather than a game that most people will just go ":(, it's too confusing/hard/big/open".
Also, you can't defend Oblivion by attacking Morrowind, that just doesn't make sense. I suppose I'm kinda guilty of the inverse of that, but these were things that I had seen done by the same company before and was promised in the sequel. I hate it because they pulled all their punches and didn't do what they more than had to ability to, instead making a game pandering to the damn xbox kiddies and their bottom line.
I look for stories and innovation in my fpses. Sometimes run and gun is fun, but then I damn well want a timer, shots fired, shots hit, number of enemies killed, points collected and every other stat you can imagine to come up at the end of a level. Not enough games do this.
-
I'm not attacking Morrowind...more defending Oblivion on the grounds that I haven't been tainted with Morrowind's evil geist.
Back on-topic with the TC now, Prey was somewhat wasted potential. I mean, it did it's thing (portals and gravity and spirits, oh my!) a lot, but they could've done it better. After seeing the first video of Portals, it kinda pissed me off how simplistic the puzzles in Prey were. And I really wish they played around with the planets and stuff, like fight a boss from that miniature planet in Downward Spiral, weaken him and a portal back out opens up and you can shoot him some, and then he recovers and creates a portal back in under your feet. Or tunnels in the miniature planets, or whipping around the planets in the tiny ship things like a comet would.
Also, the weapons, outside of the shotgun, pissed me off. They were so utterly...generic, alt-fire on a lot of them was stupid, only one ammo clip for each weapon.
And the cheesy way they tacked on the option for a sequel sucked mightily.
The rest of it was really good, though, I love games that let you look up at the stars (Quake 4, Oblivion), which are beautifully bitmapped.
-
Also, you can't defend Oblivion by attacking Morrowind, that just doesn't make sense. I suppose I'm kinda guilty of the inverse of that, but these were things that I had seen done by the same company before and was promised in the sequel. I hate it because they pulled all their punches and didn't do what they more than had to ability to, instead making a game pandering to the damn xbox kiddies and their bottom line.
Actually, I can defend Oblivion by attacking Morrowind, because Oblivion did it right. They had a world that was simultaneously overwhelmingly huge and perfectly accessible. They didn't punish the player for not wanting to spend 20 minutes walking to a cave to artificially make the game "more immersive" because you're wasting a fuckload of time staring at the next rock you have to pass. They still rewarded the player for exploring, though, since 80% of the game you probably won't see just by doing the main quests. The only flaws to the game were that the leveling system was broken and combat was too shallow.
I'm 100 hours in and still loving the game, though. The most breathtaking sight I've ever seen was after I bought Knights of the Nine and unlocked Frostcrag Spire, went straight to the top, and looked out over Cyrodiil. Simply amazing, the detail and love that went into it.
Rule number one of making a video game is that it should be fun. They made a game that was way more fun to way more people. Good on them.
-
Alternatively, Morrowind did it right. The walking wasn't intended to add to the immersion, that's just a byproduct of them not seeing a need to add shortcuts. If there was a concious intention there it was to add a bit of a downside to heavy armour and filling your inventory full of everything you might ever need.There is absolutely nothing that I can say to make you think this and there is absolutely nothing you can say to sway me to your point of view. We're after different things in games and that's not gonna change.
They threw out their niche to pander to a wider audience, I'm disappointed (and a little bitter) that they didn't deliver the spiritual sequel to a game that I love.
Rule number one of a roleplaying game is that it should be engaging. The game was much less engaging.
-
I'm somewhat of a twitch gamer, I'll admit, so I found the length of time it takes to get into Morrowind to be a little too long for my liking, which is why I stopped playing after a few hours. I'll give it another shot this summer, but that's one of the reasons I was much more immersed in Oblivion, was that it was a lot simpler to get involved with the game. And with Morrowind, for some reason I didn't feel like we were allowed to stray too much from questing. I just got kinda impatient with the whole thing and decided to play something else. But seriously guys, this thread is derailed. Pick up the pieces.
-
I got tired of Oblivion pretty quickly. Too much aimlessness for my liking. I do hope that Fallout 3 turns out well.
-
Half Life 2
The storyline makes no sense, wtf I'm trying to escape a city, there are aliens or something, some crazy scientist gives you a gravity gun??? then wtf Zombies and a crazy preacher. Never got any further then that because it was pissing me off too much.
Um, If you only played a small portion of a game then you have absolutely no right or authority to critique it either positively or negatively. The story is an evolving one. The game is a series with future installments where the story is further explained and more and more comes to light. It is gradual. It has pacing. It doesn't hit the player over the head with the entier plot from the get-go. It is really rather foolish to judge a game based upon a few levels and as a result I think your rant holds no water. Play and finish the game and then come back and tell us what you think.
-
They threw out their niche to pander to a wider audience, I'm disappointed (and a little bitter) that they didn't deliver the spiritual sequel to a game that I love.
I'm really worried that's going to be how I'm going to feel about Fallout 3.
-
Um, If you only played a small portion of a game then you have absolutely no right or authority to critique it either positively or negatively. The story is an evolving one. The game is a series with future installments where the story is further explained and more and more comes to light. It is gradual. It has pacing. It doesn't hit the player over the head with the entier plot from the get-go. It is really rather foolish to judge a game based upon a few levels and as a result I think your rant holds no water. Play and finish the game and then come back and tell us what you think.
I can apreciate games that have a storyline etc, but not when it's disjointed enough to have an impact on my enjoyment of the game. I played up to the Zombie level (Ravendark I think it was called), then I got too frustrated with the game to continue playing, so sadly I don't think I'll ever finish it. The whole use gravity gun solve physics puzzles repeat just really bugged me, somepeople love the game I get this but well I'm not a fan, since this threat was created to rant, I think I'm pretty justified in my ranting.
-
If you want to play games with CHARACTERS play a RPG (Which I love), when I play a FPS I want to blow shit up.
I want you, Scytale, to look over this statement. I want you to pore over it and memorize it with all the energy you can muster. I want this phrase to enter into your very core, to become memorized and repeated over and over again until you understand its every possible inflection.
Now I want you to think about some things. Think about the movie The Wild Bunch. Think about how tough a time Sam Peckinpah must have had getting such an artistic Western made. Sure, there's a big gunfight at the end but most of the movie asks tough and uncomfortable questions about morality! Nobody wants to see a Western that asks those sorts of questions! And when people think "science fiction" they think lasers and shooting and stuff! Where did Arthur C. Clarke get off writing about monoliths and evolution and my God it being full of stars? What a jerk. At least the monolith could have shot a laser, right? And why did the Beatles make Sgt. Pepper anyways? Pop music was going perfectly fine without any big bands releasing crazy, pretentious art music! Nobody wants to buy that when they're listening to pop, right?
See where this is going?
I want you to realize that gamers are having a hard enough fucking time as it is getting established artists to consider video games as art without people pulling this kind of garbage. Jesus Christ, man. Instead of being a genre gamer, pull yourself together and just play the goddamn game. If I could make it through about a third of the game more than you did and I'm running Half-Life 2 on a three-year-old Dell with no upgrades then surely you as a power user can slog through a plot you've barely even delved into (and, honestly guys, isn't that confusing) and actually start to appreciate games with emotional heft outside of one goddamn genre.
Painkiller, which was mentioned, is great. But it was also great at providing that atmosphere, which was crucial. And it felt a little shallow because there was nothing really behind it conceptually besides "dude goes to purgatory and totally rips shit up brah!"
I don't want to waste my time on anything which doesn't give me a reason to care. Music, movies, books, video games - at the end of the day, I want something that engages me. Video games are already far from a passive form as it is, so why should they only be interesting on a purely superficial level?
Oh, hating games. Uh, I played FlatOut. It was pretty bad.
-
I haven't actually seen "the Wild Bunch", but your movie analogy is a good one.
I see games kind of the same way as movies, when I sit down to play a game it's like renting a movie, if I rent an action movie I know I'm going to have lots of explosions, and little in the way of plot development, same with games, For me FPS are the action movies of the games world, maybe I'm wrong but thats how I like them, I don't have to think I don't want to solve puzzles, I want explosions and a way to mindlessly enjoy myself for a couple of hours. Sure maybe it's only entertaining on a "superficial level" but hey Die Hard is a great movie and Quake is a great game.
As far as the art vs entertainment debate goes thats always going to be contriversal, why do games need to be accepted as a "legitimate art" form, especially when you consider that the vast quanitity of all games are commercial realeases, targeted at the consumer, which reaks of an entertainment product to me. I'm not a philospohy scholar but in my view once you start producing something aimed at achieving commercial success it's no longer art but a commodity.
I'm not sure what you mean by genre gamer, I won't lie my absolutely favorite games are all turn based type empire building games (Alpha Centauri, Civilization etc) but I'll play just about any genre. Half Life 2 just left a bad taste in my mouth after playing it, I've outlined my reasons for disliking it, you can choose to disagree thats fine, in the end we are individuals.
-
Every game has its problems. For every hugely great moment you encounter in Morrowind, you have about 50 moments where you're all like "Oh, screw you, Cliff Racer... FUCK YOU TO HELL!" For every scenic vista in Oblivion, you have those moments where you're like "Why the hell do I even pay for a horse?" And for every good battle in Half-Life 2, you have the huge load times and bullshit physics puzzles. Who else is tired of piling those cinder blocks on that ramp after every play through? Ultimately, it's a video game. It isn't real life, and there's gonna be aggravation.
A side note to twitch FPS fans: look up Serious Sam. Still insanely fun.
-
You know what game I hate?? Star Ocean 3. Star Ocean 2, which I finally got around to beating about a week ago, has always been one of my absolute favorite PS1 RPGs. Star Ocean 3 FEELS like Star Ocean 2, but everything it adds/changes is just wrong. The whole game itself is an awkward 3D mess that has the same "awful looking dolls" aesthetic that makes the first Xenosaga game look like total ass, but is actually a poorer game because of the battle system. In Star Ocean 2, the battles were in real time, and they were effectively on a 3D plane despite the 2D graphics. Star Ocean 3 is the same, except that the hit detection is unforgiving and too exacting. I never felt that when I missed with attacks or killer moves in SO2 that it was unfair, but I felt like this all the time in SO3. Finally, SO3's story basically squats down and takes a huge shit all over the first two games of the series, effectively employing a Matrix plot twist to make the first two games meaningless. I bought SO3 for 15 bucks and I feel ripped off.
-
As far as the art vs entertainment debate goes thats always going to be contriversal, why do games need to be accepted as a "legitimate art" form, especially when you consider that the vast quanitity of all games are commercial realeases, targeted at the consumer, which reaks of an entertainment product to me. I'm not a philospohy scholar but in my view once you start producing something aimed at achieving commercial success it's no longer art but a commodity.
So...movies? Not art?
Books? Not art?
Music? Not art?
-
The thing is, Scytale, why can't a game deliver both? What's wrong with an action game involving a lot of shooting and explosions and running and deaths and awesome action sequences and plot development, mature themes, complexity, ambiguity and everything that comes along with great art? I don't think there should have to be a separation. That's why I used The Wild Bunch. It's a Western and as such there are multiple scenes with shootin' but they're also heavily balanced with scenes that convey a remarkable amount of intellectual depth. Sgt. Pepper is still pop music, but it's such a visionary records that it extends and surpasses the barriers of what pop music was supposed to be about. I'm trying to say that games can be the same way, and that thinking otherwise is what results in stuff like Clover Studio's shutdown.
The "genre gamer" bit was essentially me saying that I really don't like it when people engage themselves in entertainment because they know what they'll be getting from a certain genre. It's not only way too safe, it's a major artistic deterrent. If people like Dean Koontz, Dan Brown and Tom Clancy didn't consistently pump out garbage genre fiction there might be more interest in better novelists. The same is true for video games.
-
JC, I know there is a line to marry you, but I'd like my name put on the list.
-
Uhm, I like Dean Koontz, and the way his stories make me consider alternate possiblities.
As for the rest - meh...
-
JC, I know there is a line to marry you, but I'd like my name put on the list.
You're close to the top because I know what kind of sandwiches you like*.
*they feature "grilled meat"
-
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.
-
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.
-
Well, enough on that then, any other games you hate, Scytale?
-
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.
-
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.
-
Well, enough on that then, any other games you hate, Scytale?
Hmm now you mention it I can't really stand Command and Conquer Generals.
-
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 don't really pat attention to games. I almost never read reviews, and I always buy games a year or two after they were first released because then they're very cheap. Like I said, I liked what little I'd seen of the original game, so I went for the closest I could get. When it comes to role-playing games there's generally far fewer to choose from than first-person shooters, or real-time strategy games. When you factor in the limitations of my laptop, the field is narrowed even further. Ultimately I was naive: I didn't believe that a group of people would voluntarily spend years of effort and a heap of money to create a great big pile of shit. I was wrong.
-
I'm going to go with the Civilization series. I hated these game with all my heart. The idea of having certain points to move is kinda stupid. It reminded me of a computer version of Risk. Which is okay because I don't like Risk either. Age of Empires I,II, and III are, without a doubt, much better in terms of game play and strategy. On that note Age of Empires: Mythology (or whatever it's called) was really, really bad.
-
I think there are only 3 people in the world who actually likes C & C generals and they all work for westwood studios...
-
Shut your goddamn mouth!
Westwood had nothing to do with Generals. They were dissolved after RA2 and Yuri were released.
I miss them so very much. :(
-
Oh. God.
Did anyone ever play Amazon Trail? It's this really ghetto game that you have to play in 265 color mode. I'm pretty sure it was just named in the dire hope that someone would mistake it for Oregon Trail. It's even a misnomer- I mean, how is it even remotely a trail when you're going down the longest RIVER in the world with a CANOE and PADDLE?
Basically, there is no plot, just a panther of some sort from the ancient past telling you to collect things for the Inca King, who is sick with malaria. You, despite being his only hope, have an arduous journey. There are too many ways to die even if you're a responsible gamer. You can contract diseases for no real reason, "run" into the randomised ships that are impossible to avoid (causing you to contract dysentery at the same time), you can get shocked by an electric eel, and (my favorite) you can also get kidnapped totally out of the blue by a tribe of savage Indians.
Not a single aspect of the game is entertaining. The only thing that brought a remote amount of joy was fishing, which gets old after you are saddled, because of the clumsy controls, with a log that you simply were nowhere near harpooning. Everything else - meeting poorly animated and voiced historical figures, wasting all of your money on tents because you were forced to drop yours into the river by a passing capybera, even having to sit in the jungle to take a picture of a very poorly animated butterfly - was lackluster, even grating.
Why would the inca king need a river turtle anyway?
As far as I'm concerned, educational games jumped the shark at Number Cruncher.
-
What about Africa Trail and Yukon Trail? I actually own Oregon Trail 3, although not on purpose. It was a christmas present, and mildly entertaining the first few times.
-
If I remember correctly, Yukon Trail actually was a fun game.
-
I enjoyed Yukon Trail when I was a kid. I've always wanted to go back and play it again.
-
I'm somewhat of a twitch gamer, I'll admit, so I found the length of time it takes to get into Morrowind to be a little too long for my liking, which is why I stopped playing after a few hours. I'll give it another shot this summer, but that's one of the reasons I was much more immersed in Oblivion, was that it was a lot simpler to get involved with the game. And with Morrowind, for some reason I didn't feel like we were allowed to stray too much from questing. I just got kinda impatient with the whole thing and decided to play something else. But seriously guys, this thread is derailed. Pick up the pieces.
Got it, immediately downloaded the graphics enhancers and the unofficial patches. I can now kind of see what McTaggart was talking about. It is quite fun, but after playing Oblivion, feels kind of...dead. No deer or butterflies, the soundtrack has one loop that doesn't really seem to fit with the ambience of the game. The one cave I've been in so far had the same texture plastered on every surface save for the steps and was incredibly dark, even with a torch. It's damn near impossible to see the fishes when they're attacking you. And I'm still relatively annoyed at the map in Morrowind...they'd have several markers for the same city on the map, and you had to manually add dungeons and places of note to it. And a lot of the architecture leaves little to the imagination (meaning that it's easier to get lost in the cities because most of the buildings look the same).
That being said, there seem to be a few more voice actors in it than Oblivion had (this was never a problem for me, though). The people (although they don't talk as much) are much more...involved. I do like the way they made you use landmarks for navigation...Oblivion tried this a couple times and it didn't work. I had a horrendous time trying to find Dragonclaw Rock. I like the random loot better (partially because it's completely random and not limited to calipers and tongs (which I need to collect for Shivering Isles, this guy'll give me money for it).
It has a few things done better than Oblivion, that's for sure. But when all the NPC's in the game act like they're neighbors spying on each other, it really detracts from the immersion. If I gave Oblivion a 10, I'd give this an 8.25. I'm going to keep playing it to see if it improves.
Yukon Trail: Maybe for you, but I thought it was worse than Amazon Trail. When you got tickets for the boat, there was a pointless calendar-pages-flipping sequence that may or may not have hidden load processes. When you're on the boat, you can't do anything outside of looking at your journal and/or restarting because the boat crashed. When you got to actually hiking, you usually didn't make it very far, either. Perhaps I'm just bitching about the obscene level of difficulty they threw upon millions of elementary school children, but I didn't enjoy it much.
-
I hate what Capcom did to Megaman. Megaman 2 was the best NES game in existence, and so I felt like I had a duty to be a fan of the entire series, but around 5 Capcom just broke my heart. I tried to keep liking the games, I really tried, but it was like being in an abusive relationship. Now it's hard for me to even think about those games, because of the emotional roller-coaster they represent.
-
I hate Halo.
Yes, it introduced the FPS to millions of people who bought the Xbox. Yes, it was pretty. But everything it had beyond graphics had been done better before. Quake, Half-Life, Doom, these games really immerse you in the experience, a LOT better than Halo, and they don't have that annoying Warthog thing either.
I also hate sports titles, but mostly just 'cause I totally suck at them.
-
Megaman 3 was also really great, and the Megaman X series was pretty good from what I recall. Or at least, the games I played in it (X3 and X6, I think?) were.
-
I got the MMX Collection for PS2.
MMX1-4 are top notch, excellent games.
After that it goes downhill.
-
I hate Elite Beat Agents. Well, that's not fair; I love the game itself. I just hate that 'Jumpin Jack Flash' is ridiculously hard. I refuse to believe that anyone who isn't enhanced by either cybernetics or drugs has beaten it.
-
Gran Turismo. How exactly has the most mind-numblingly boring series on the face of the earth managed to sell over 40 million copies?
-
Gran Turismo. How exactly has the most mind-numblingly boring series on the face of the earth managed to sell over 40 million copies?
yeah what the fuck is Gran Turismo? i have never understood it's appeal. blegh
-
Plain and simple: Pac-man. Any and all of them...
You have a fricken orange canibalizing other oranges with "Ghosts" chasing it around. And why doesn't he grow bigger when he eats? Why do people think the game is so damned addicting?
I'm off to go feed my Pac-Man addiction now...
-
I feel the same way about Gran Turismo as I do about most racing games, and as I do about most sports games : they are extremely fucking boring. Especially team sports games. I have no reason or desire to play a game in which the main activity is something I could go outside and do.
-
I say exactly the same thing about FPSs.
-
So you can go out and blast aliens away with 200-pound assault rifles any ol' time?
-
The point is, if I want to play a racing game, I'll play something like Burnout or Mario Kart. Games that are... I don't know, more fun than the oh-so-exciting experience of driving a car.
Realistic sports games are much the same way, although I'll play them occasionally. Apparently the Wii version of Madden is actually pretty fun to play.
-
I find Wii Madden to be frustrating a fucking hell. CASUAL MY ASS. I might as well be doing interpretive dance.
-
Realistic racing games are less about instant fun than taking pleasure in slowly getting better and better. If you're not the sort of person who'll spend four hours trying to shave .3 of a second off your best time then you're probably not gonna get as much out of it as some other people.
-
I don't mind realism in racing games as long as it FEELS like I'm going fast. Like Forza Motorsport, dunno about the second one, but the first did a good job in making me feel like I was actually driving a fucking sports car, not a goddamn box powered by a gerbil and it's running wheel attached to the running block.
-
I'm tired of multi-platform releases. It works between consoles, but it doesn't work so well with console and pc releases. It just seems to me that games are simplified to cater to the console, and that gimps the pc release.
I only had one gripe with Morrowind, and that was the combat system. I could see the guys pores, and yet, I'm to not be able to hit the guy on three out of five attacks.
-
I think you missed the point of Painkiller. The point of Painkiller was speed runs and OH MY GOD THIS GUN PINS DUDES TO WALLS!
-
You also forgot "HOLY FUCK THIS BOSS IS LIKE A MOUNTAIN".
-
Indeed, what other game do you start with what is practically a lethally modded weedwacker.
-
"HE'S JUST HUGE AND THE STAKES DO NOTHING"
-
Xenosaga.
Xenogears is one of my favorite games, so you can imagine my disappointment upon playing Xenosaga. Obviously, it wasn't meant to be a true sequel/prequel, and I wasn't expecting such. I was expecting a playable game with interesting characters and an enjoyable plot. Unfortunately, I got this slow, extremely cheap battle system that, when in motion, is the equivalent of swimming through molasses. If I'm not having fun, I'm not going to stick around for the story. Of course, the story didn't strike me as that great, either. Nothing that occurred made inching through the drudgery of the battle system worth it.
-
If I remember correctly, Yukon Trail actually was a fun game.
It was, actually. There was river rafting and my favourite part was when you picked your site. If it was lucrative, like a dozen people would show up and pan straight gold from the river.
Maya Trail, now that was a shitty game. The plot was that an asteroid was going to hit Earth (!) unless you deciphered a bunch of clues in Mayan temples. You biked to each temple. And the temples were kind of like exploring in Myst, i.e. utterly dead. Then you could go in the temple and into a little D&D-style maze except there were no enemies ever. It was boring as shit and I couldn't figure out what to do so the world kept exploding.
-
fething
Nerd.
I hate Wurm Online simply because it is almost perfectly what I want from the genre (reality sim) yet it fails on crucial points. Bascially, Wurm Online is a big world, populated by players that have gone out and made their own settlements, organisations, etc. There are no NPCs in the game except for merchants and monsters, everything in the game is player created and player run. This is awesome.
Unfortunately for me, it is extremely tedious. You have to dedicate a lot of time and effort to menial tasks to keep up what you've created, and somehow earn money to buy a deed and hire guards, etc. While this isn't too bad in a community, the tedium does get to you. The massive effort to do anything in the game is a huge put-off. On the other hand I suppose this is what makes the game realistic, slows down the development of the landscape to a manageable pace, and provides a bigger sense of accomplishment when you finally get something done.
What really screws up the game is the distinction between free players and people that pay to play. While a lot of the differences are fair, you can buy in game money cheaply, meaning free players have no chance unless they spend most of their time on the game.
-
A game which I did not hate but was rather immensely disappointed in: Black and White.
It had been pretty hyped before its release and I immediately bought it. The thing is I can't even remember why I did not even finish the third island. I just was not motivated to spend more than a few hours with the game. Six to seven years later it is kinda puzzling now that I think about it. I bought it, installed it, played it two or three days, ejected the CD and forgot about the game. And I can't even remember what exactly bothered me about B&W.
On the ongoing Halflife 2 discussion:
I did not like HL2 terribly much mainly for its lack of a proper story (in my eyes). I have witnessed year-long debates about the implications and nature of the story in gamers' forums and yeah, I find myself asking: What did I actually accomplish, who did I fight against actually...? The whole game is experienced from Gordon Freeman's perspective with no cutscenes transcending his personal viewpoint and giving away information to the player. Some might like this feature, I did not. I didn't know what was going on and GF's unnatural silence throughout the game was unnecessary and didn't help me to enjoy the game. For me HL2 was not very exciting and to be honest the gameplay was not that smooth, too.
-
I'm tired of multi-platform releases. It works between consoles, but it doesn't work so well with console and pc releases. It just seems to me that games are simplified to cater to the console, and that gimps the pc release.
Seconded. Unfortunately I think it's pretty safe to say that barring some unforeseen turn of events, the PC gaming market is slowly dying, being replaced by the console market. Don't believe me? Check out the PC games section of your nearest Best Buy. Four years ago, the PC games section took up a quarter of the whole store. Two years ago, it took up two racks (front and back) in the middle of the Home Computing section (but I'm not counting the budget/youth/educational titles that no self-respecting gamer would purchase, like "ABC Turtle Teaches Spelling" and your "Bratz: Do-It-Yourself Brazilian Waxing for Young Girls" games). A year ago, the gaming section took up one rack (front and back). Last time I went in there, about a month ago, I was looking at half of one side of one rack. The console games section has had the inverse development.
I only had one gripe with Morrowind, and that was the combat system. I could see the guys pores, and yet, I'm to not be able to hit the guy on three out of five attacks.
Try 49 times out of 50. The numbers-based combat and magic in Morrowind originally put me off of the game entirely, but luckily a friend of mine convinced me to give it a second shot. Once you get past the first few levels of your weapon of choice (and for this, the mudcrabs and rats are perfect), combat becomes much easier and less frustrating. I never did get the hang of the magic system though, aside from enchanting weapons. Still, Morrowind (and its expansions) was, for three years, my favorite video game ever, until Oblivion came out.
Now I can't honestly say that Oblivion replaced Morrowind for the #1 spot... It's not a horrible game (once you mod it up to fix the broken leveling system, the bad LOD, and some of the "well duh" glitches and missing features) but I still wouldn't call it my favorite game, by any sense of the word.
The reason Morrowind stopped being my favorite game after Oblivion is because after Oblivion, Morrowind felt downright unplayable. The problem with playing a next-generation sequel to a great game is that all the limitations and flaws that were barely noticeable before suddenly stop being so easy to miss. The characters in Morrowind ceased to be slightly-pixelated, poorly-proportioned, oddly-behaving people in my eyes, and instead became poorly-rendered, poorly-designed, poorly-scripted cardboard cutouts. The game-stopping glitches and crashes to desktop became downright unacceptable. AI scripting and bot-pathing became glaringly clunky. The interface, which I still think was far better implemented than the Oblivion one, suddenly started screaming "OBSOLETE!" at me every time I tried to use it. The enchantment system stopped being so familiar. And so many other things. Oblivion took away my ability to enjoy Morrowind.
Thankfully, Oblivion is not entirely a lost cause. There's a lot you can do to improve things with mods. With the right ones installed, you can pretty much turn the game into a true successor to Morrowind. But you can't fix the goofy AI. You can't fix the boring, generic-fantasy scenery. You can't fix the voice-acting problems. And you can't bring back the giant mushroom trees looming overhead, the "tap-a-tap-a-tap-a" of a nearby squib, the mating calls of the netch off in the distance, or the raspy Ashlanders urging you to "make it quick, n'wah!" It's just never going to be the same.
I loved Shivering Isles, by the way. Even if the rest of it was horrible (and it wasn't), the return of the giant mushroom trees made it worth the $30.
Oh, yeah, games I hate:
Lionheart promised to be an intelligent, deep RPG with one foot firmly rooted in medieval history, and the other in classic fantasy. Instead it was... half of a just-barely-decent game. Where was the other half? I don't know. I bought it on release day for the full $50, and a month later it was in the bargain bin for $9.99.
-
Off topic, but concerning Morrowind vs. Oblivion:
Since both titles used essentially the same editor to build (The Elder Scrolls Construction Kit), wouldn't it be possible to, with a little- okay, a lot- of work to convert the entirety of Morrowind over to what would amount to an Oblivion expansion? I mean, Morrowind has the BB mod, as well as numerous HD texture packs, so with some more effort and maybe a good month spent relabeling the coordinates of every last map square in the entire game, you could take the enhanced Morrowind features, update them to Oblivion level, and balance out the interfaces? People have done massive amounts on both within the modding community already, and this has struck me as the next logical step since seeing Oblivion release. Come to think of it, I've always wondered why neither Daggerfall, Arena, nor Battlespire were ever recreated within Morrowind beyond the dedication of time.
Of course, this is coming from someone who wants to get familiar enough with TESCS to recreate the entirety of A Link to the Past in their Morrowind file...
-
A) Because of possible copyright violations that that would construe, and
B) Because that's a shit-ton of work for someone who's probably not going to get paid and as a consequence of A) might even be blacklisted in the professional development community. Even as a group effort, that is going to take a very long time to do (seeing as morrowind files do not work with oblivion, everything would essentially have to be copied by hand), and I doubt anyone is going to want to incur a lawsuit. If it does happen it'll probably be court-ordered to cease a la Ocarina of Time 2D.
-
What he said.
Not to mention that with the older games, format doesn't allow for porting: Most of Daggerfall's geography was generated randomly, for a truly immense game world. Morrowind doesn't support that. Also, in porting one game to another, you'd have to recode the game's script, during which time you'll inevitably face old behaviors that are no longer supported, or new behaviors that you'd like to add in. Repeat that cycle a few times, and pretty soon you're looking at a completely changed product, with just the setting remaining the same. At which point you realize that "wait, someone's already been working on that (http://tamriel-rebuilt.org/) for a long while!"
-
I really freaking hate God of War 2. The game pissed me off because I'd just start getting into killing a group of enemies and then they'd be gone and it'd be time for a puzzle. I'd just start enjoying the puzzle and it would end. It ended up frustrating not because of difficulty, but because of the fact that everything was cut before it would start being enjoyable.
Made me sad because I had such high hopes for it after the first one.
-
Morrowind, Oblivion: I didn't like either of them. I mean I had some fun playing them, but then I'd pick up a quest that I HAD to get through that wasn't right for my lvl, or I'd find myself standing in a city and not knowing what to do. Awesome concepts, I just wish they were better.
Black and White 2: again awesome concept. Spent hours playing it and got pissed off. it was just too tedious to try to balance doing 80 billion things at once and keep everyone happy.
Animal crossing for the ds: I love it and I hate it. I hate it because I shouldn't like it, but I do. It appeals to my OCD side.
-
Star Ocean: Till the End of Time - Which you'll be playing til the end of time. It's not so much that I hated it, but more along the lines of I enjoyed it for the first half or so, then started to wonder if I was near the end, then I wasn't, I wasn't even halfway through like I thought I was. The game was faaaaar to long. I like a good meaty RPG, one that can keep me entertained without opening my wallet for a month or so for another game, but not that long. I don't think I ever beat it. I have no desire to try. There is no light at the end of the tunnel. Just an endless tunnel, til the end of time.
-
I remember deriving enjoyment out of playing Amazon Trail for hours at a time. I was a terribly deprived child.
-
Myst/Riven: I'm all for thinking/puzzle games and granted its age/time of creation I'm willing to give it a little lee-way (spelling?), but after wasting away what had to be well over a week on each game at their given time I always just got sick of them both. So before uninstalling I found out how to get to the ending real fast and see this grand finale that was so hyped up.
Black & White 2: BW1 was great, it needed some fixes and extra things added and thats just what I hoped BW2 would be. Don't get me wrong I played BW2 all the way through, but about the time of the 2nd Japanese land it got realllllly boring/redundant really fast. Especially if you were being a 'good/softy' god. The experience was at least more fun being evil. Nothing like having an overpopulated city and picking up all the residents of the local nursery and throwing them as hard as possible with your mouse right into your defensive WALL. :evil:
Lineage 2: I've played FFXI and WoW, now playing LoTR:O. When I tried this game out I gave it a good 3 weeks before wanting to call up PlayNC and yell at them.
Guild Wars: L2's little/big brother. Fun game to play, but playability quickly quickly diminishes. Get to Searing, check. Get to 20, check. Get Ascended, check. Do quests to unlock all subjobs, check. Now what? New expansion. Get Ascended, check. All subjobs given for FREE?! Beautiful game and I still play it every once and a while, but most RPGs that I really enjoy have a ton of replayability. Short of deleting my chars every week and starting all over, GW didn't do it for me.
Half Life 2: After reading this thread, I must be the only guy who's either a pansy or too honest to admit that Doom 3 scared the living shit out of me. A friend told me HL2 was even more of a fear kind of game so I tried it out. Beat it so horribly fast on the starting difficulty and the story was such that I didn't care to go back through on a harder one. Also, while people want to say the story line is episodic and why thats ok theres cliffhangers - I have no problem with that. I have a problem with shelling out cash for each episode which is so pathetically short that it barely seemed to constitute half a 'chapter' in the story. On the other hand I can't wait for Team Fortress 2 to come out on the same engine.
Fear: Wasn't scary and it felt like a rip off combination of bad pop horror movies and old classic fps shoot 'em up games.
I'm sure there's more games but its a long list already. Also I have oblivion as well as a ton of mods installed to alter different things. Its a fun game to load and just wander about in, wait for night and sneak into a shop and kill the owner and fence the stuff. But as far as going all the way with the story line and grinding in the game I just never felt inclined.
To balance it out games that aren't bad at least right now. Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (Beta 1 right now, but Beta 2 next week woo!) good deal of fun and super fast action, Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar, just starting really, but fun so far - Diablo 2 loved it and finally put it to rest after however many years.
In any case I don't get to play the games that often, so I get quite picky/choosey on which ones get to take up my precious time. :-D
-
The thing with games like Doom and F.E.A.R. is that since they're marketed as scary, they do everything possible to make it scary. With me, I was expecting it to be scary and thus moved slowly looking in every nook and cranny twice, which ended up having me far less surprised than they probably intended. Something about headcrabs jumping at my face I just found to be scarier. My two cents on the whole scary in games bit.
-
F.E.A.R. lacked the following two elements:
Variety (office, warehouse, office, vent, warehouse, warehouse, vent, office, office, office) - a real outdoor or urban episode instead of the indoor levels would have been much appreciated. Oh, and more kinds of enemies.
An exciting end fight - to be precise the end was totally anti-climactic. I hate games where I can't spend my dearly saved ammunition on the last boss in a gigantic battle.
The story itself was okay but I would have liked more proper cutscenes, maybe from a more omniscient perspective than the protagonist, in addition to the phone calls, flashbacks and dream sequences. Same problem like HL2 for me personally - it is not difficult to miss details of the story.
-
Not telling cutscenes outside of Freeman's perspective was a conscious decision by the developers, who had it well within their powers to do otherwise. I respect their choice, really. I gather it's the same idea with F.E.A.R.
To an extent it's like a book or film which never leaves the perspective of the protagonist - like everything but the last five minutes of Rear Window, for example.
-
I know, it's just my personal preference, really.
-
Fuzion Frenzy 2.
Now, the first Fuzion Frenzy is in no way an amazing game, but it's hilarious to play. Imagine Mario Party with only mini games, and instead of collecting stars you collect orbs. Insert embarrassing dialogue and you have a game worth playing because it's funny.
Fuzion Frenzy 2 did away with orbs, and the dialogue. It was lame. I hate that game.
-
I'm gonna have to go with Vanguard: Saga of Heros. For a game that had almost infinite potential, that game really blew. First, it suffered all of the lag issues that accompany the new release of an MMO, except they never got better. Then they completely pigeonholed all of the archtypes classes, and even the more they gimped the hybred classes so much that no one ever wanted to group with them. The crafting system had potential, until they adjusted the frequency of rare materials and the experience gain down to the point where gaining a crafting level between 30-40 took a week or so each, and 40-50 took about 2 weeks per level. And that's if you only hardcore grind work orders, which gives you little money and a very slight chance of getting rare materials.
One of the draws of the game was to make a world so big, you had to spend weeks in an area just to explore everything. Except there was nothing worth exploring. You'd spend a whole evening running across the world to get to a far corner, only to find out that the devs hadn't populated it with mobs yet. Or worse, there were huge unbeatable mobs that 1 shot you with a glance. Mobs that don't have loot tables either, so even if you did manage to beat one, it was worth nothing, not even cash or vendor drops. So instead, everyone just ran around in the same areas, which without instancing, means you'd have multiple groups down in a dungeon area either racing for bosses or trying to train mobs onto the other group. Another thing that they went and did is introduce teleporters all over, that make crossing the huge amazing world now take seconds, so you never get a real attachment to any one place. It also trivialized the sale of boats, which were intended to be player made transporation on the oceans and rivers, but ended up mostly being status symbols because of their rediculously high costs. Also, the caravan travel system (where you can log out with your guildmates, and log back on near them regardless of where they've moved to) still hasn't been implimented. That was one of the features they promised from the early start.
Vanguard also was supposed to have a really slow leveling system, which is mostly fine, except then they went about having double xp weekends for adventuring, and regularly increasing xp from mobs until you could gain about a level a night even at high levels, up to WoW standards. While the adventurers were power leveling, the crafters were not, falling further and further behind, until the primary purpose of even the most dedicated crafters was to create twink gear for high level adventurers alt characters. Imagine investing 1000+ hours only to have the only reward for the work to make mediochre gear for peoples alt characters. Sigil origionally promised the best gear in the game would be crafted, or crafting augemented. To my knowledge, this still hasen't been included (and probably won't ever be) making the highest level craftable gear around level 45 (for level 50 characters) while the highest dropped gear is around level 55 (useable by level 50 characters becaue of janky equipment expertese system)
I'm not even going to go into the whole SOE hostile takeover part of Sigil Games and the firing of the lead developement team. Last time I was on (almost 6 month now) they hadn't patched since the time before (almost 12 months now). Almost everyone online I talked to were just killing time before their account ran out. Also, gold seller bots were rampant, and entire server economies were permanantly ruined.
As I said, what had potential as an amazingly in depth and vast game ended up being a pipe dream to thousands of MMO gamers looking for a WoW alternative, and a major let down.
-
Man. Registering just to rant about a mediocre MMO.
Still, that does sound pretty abysmal. I wish there would be an MMO that respected crafters and traders as much as adventurers.
-
Oddly I am going to have to credit Eve for honoring crafters as much as adventurers, odd but true.
-
I hold a special hatred in my heart for Pools of Radiance (The one released in 2004.) The install was impossible for me, it needed 2 gigs in your C drive, but I had partitioned my drive so that C had Windows installed and was a total of 2.5 gigs... D and E were huge though!
Eventually they released a patch which allowed you to install to a different drive... But even then the installer would check your C drive for space first....
Sigh. I stuck with it and actually got a new hard drive. Then I realized it was a stale game with no point, a ton of lag and absolutely no discernable plot. To be fair, I gave up after a total of about 4 hours, but I don't think a single part of that experience was fun for me.
-
While I loved 1 & 2, Resident Evil 4 is one of the only games my PS2 will never play again. I did fine in the older games, but I couldn't get really good at the controls in this game, hence I was killed so fast in the beginning of the game (again, and again, and again) - that I couldn't even really start the story of the game. Things like that really drove me nuts so I just turned off the game and played something else.
-
Perhaps I have not played this game enough to determine this, but jesus fuck I really hate Valkyrie Profile 2.
I got it in the mail yesterday, put it in for 3 hours today and is now getting mailed back.
-
I hold a special hatred in my heart for Pools of Radiance (The one released in 2004.) The install was impossible for me, it needed 2 gigs in your C drive, but I had partitioned my drive so that C had Windows installed and was a total of 2.5 gigs... D and E were huge though!
Eventually they released a patch which allowed you to install to a different drive... But even then the installer would check your C drive for space first....
Sigh. I stuck with it and actually got a new hard drive. Then I realized it was a stale game with no point, a ton of lag and absolutely no discernable plot. To be fair, I gave up after a total of about 4 hours, but I don't think a single part of that experience was fun for me.
Don't worry, I beat the game and I'm here to tell you that you missed nothing. I have a tendency to play super bad games clear through for no good reason.
-
Not so much hate as wtf am I supposed to do now; Fallout 1 and 2. I don't actively dislike either, I just could never quite get the hang of them. Go find the GECK! Ok, where the fuck is the GECK? How about a clue as to where to start? Or a tutorial, for that matter? I have a feeling I might love these games (I love the setting to bits), but it just seems like a hopeless project, which is incredibly frustrating.
That's the point, though. The game doesn't hold your hand. You're thinking of it too much in terms of linearity. In 1, you're supposed to roleplay and ask people in the gameworld where a water chip can be found, and most won't know, but as you go through the different areas it eventually reveals itself (I can just tell you where to look if that's not your thing). In 2, there's no time limit. The main questline takes up barely 5% of the game, if that. It's like Oblivion, you're supposed to handle everything else the game has to offer first. Except unlike Oblivion, there are precious few fetch quests and there are usually several ways of going about solving problems. Besides, they do tell you where to start. The village elder tells you to look for Trader Vic, who had Vault 13 artifacts. You go to Klamath to find Vic at his house, he's not there. You go to the Den and it turns out he's being held hostage by slavers. Once you get Vic out, he points you to Vault City, etc. etc. But it's not a race. You should gain a few levels before heading out to VC.
But I can see how it could be confusing. A few big tips: One - always, always run a character with "small guns" tagged your first time through. Two - When you get to the Den, on the left side of the map there's a building with a trader inside along with a few junkies and whores. Kill him. You'll get all of his stuff, which you'll need, and there are no cops in the Den, so nobody cares. Three - When you're done with that punk, there's a backroom in the crackhouse to the south with a bald trader in the back wearing a green shirt. Repeat tip two, but turn up the combat movement speed in the options menu, because the junkies will scatter, and they move very slow and very far.
Now you're ready to play.
As I said in another thread, I've always hated first-party Nintendo games. I can play the later versions of Mario and enjoy them, but Zelda and Metroid bore me to tears. I also hate any game that requires grinding to play properly, ie any MMO or JRPG.
-
Halo
its only good if your good.
and I sir are not good.
And WoW for making EQ look so bad...
-
Also WoW for eating the souls of all my friends who started playing 'to see what the fuss was about' who I haven't seen in months.
-
Also WoW for eating the souls of all my friends who started playing 'to see what the fuss was about' who I haven't seen in months.
That happens far too often. And it doesn't help that most of my friends are the type that would fall for it hook, line and sinker.
-
Yeah we just got done weaning one kid off a several-year drug addiction then he's all like 'so guys I'm gonna try this Warcraft game' welp won't be seeing him for another 50 months.
-
But I can see how it could be confusing. A few big tips: One - always, always run a character with "small guns" tagged your first time through. Two - When you get to the Den, on the left side of the map there's a building with a trader inside along with a few junkies and whores. Kill him. You'll get all of his stuff, which you'll need, and there are no cops in the Den, so nobody cares. Three - When you're done with that punk, there's a backroom in the crackhouse to the south with a bald trader in the back wearing a green shirt. Repeat tip two, but turn up the combat movement speed in the options menu, because the junkies will scatter, and they move very slow and very far.
Now you're ready to play.
Hehe the fallout series ruled also; my favorite way to Roll Fallout 2 is just to haul ass and quicksave everychance you get all the way to San Fran. Talk to the Brotherhood and run up to Navaro, steal the power armor, and then go back to Klamath to commence gaming.
I usually hate games that I'm not good at including; 2d fighters and beat games. Neither of them are so bad until you start playing multiplayer though, theres nothing quite as infuriating as practicing a game all day long and then promptly getting your ass handed(over, and over, and etc) to you by your best friend.
-
that happened to me in guilty gear
-
Two Worlds. It's an attempt to take a gameworld bigger than Oblivion and some more hardcore aspects of ARPGS and mix them together. They don't even do this right. While enemies don't scale, most of them can be beaten by luring them to a health shrine which heals you whenever you're damaged; and just hacking away, making this even easier than Oblivion. The voice-acting is far more varied than Oblivion's and also far cheesier. When your character (who can only be a human male with a VERY limited set of facial features) kills a chicken and says "Say hello to Death!", you'll probably be on the floor laughing and in tears.
Considering the sheer size of this world, there are relatively few dungeons. Whereas Oblivion had somewhere in the number of 300 or so dungeons, this one has about 60, and then a few outdoor caves and enemy forts. And several hundred campsites of three bandits and a chest. Some of the chests at said camps don't even open. Horses are so poorly done that I at one point was leaning about 20 degrees from the ground, which was already at an incline, on a horse. Enemies frequently die and fall through the geometry, or stay in battle positions like statues of war. Citizens have pretty much the same response to everything in a given village. The map just sucks, quests will often give no hint whatsoever as to where you have to go (the ones where you have to find people and kill them). Entire quest lines can be skipped by doing things in the wrong order (this doesn't mean they were branching quest lines, this means that a quest line was inaccessible after completing a completely unrelated quest line). It is even possible to break the story quest line. People you have to meet for sidequests might just decide that they don't exist. You can go to their house and wait and wait and wait and nothing will happen. Quests can be solved before they're even started.
Like Oblivion and Morrowind, this game relies on cells to load areas, and lets you know when you're loading them. But just as often, there will be an unexplained hang-up of about 5 seconds. Frame rates are inconsistent, it looks awful on standard definition TVs (you can't read the damn words because they're too tiny and serif-ized). Enemy variety is almost non-existent. I made it to level 32 fighting Orcs, Goblins, Wolves, Bears, Boars, and a couple Ogres. And boatloads of shirtless bandits. It's surprisingly easy to get over insurpassable mountains and find yourself in an area the developer clearly had not planned on anybody visiting.
The whole thing is just one big fucking mess. I would bet money on the developers not hiring ANY QA testers whatsoever. Atari 2600 games had fewer bugs than this, it's just ridiculous. It has every one in the book short of deleting the root directory on uninstall.
That being said, there were two good things about the game: the Alchemy/Weapon system, and the variety of locales. The rest of the game was pretty much canned scabs in a broth of diarrhea.
-
I hate Resident Evil 4, it is over-hyped. The entire Resident Evil series has stopped being survival horror, and the controls are mediocre at best. And when taken as what is left, an over the shoulder third persion shooter, its a third rate game. The "interactive cut scenes" annoyed me to no end as well, just could not stand them. The story was bland and uninventive, I felt no attachment to any of the characters. Also, the enemies are one of the most bland types of enemies. They just come at you when they see you, or attack you. No real group dynamics are displayed. It makes me sad. :-(
-
Tribes 2.
The original Tribes evolved into an extremely fast paced, team-based, FPS with some strategy elements. Tribes 2, by design, removed/limited the speed and turned the focus from speed and aiming ability to pure strategy. Also, the attitude of the devs managed to fracture the community that had built up around the original game and destroy the franchise.
-
There is only one game I hate.
Iridion 3D for the gameboy advance.
I figured since I was an master or R-type and Gradius that I could get good at that game and obliterate it. Not the case. So frustrating I smashed a gameboy advance into itty bitty pieces and nearly snapped the cartridge in two.
-
Tribes 2.
The original Tribes evolved into an extremely fast paced, team-based, FPS with some strategy elements. Tribes 2, by design, removed/limited the speed and turned the focus from speed and aiming ability to pure strategy. Also, the attitude of the devs managed to fracture the community that had built up around the original game and destroy the franchise.
Oh my god, I had nearly put all that behind me. To say it "fractured" the community is a polite way to say it. As for myself, I'd put it this way: the way the community transitioned between Tribes games was a complete, unmitigated clusterfuck. People complain that the NMA site has the most toxic community of gamers going, but I'd say they don't hold a candle to the worst Tribes grognards. It was terrible; the developers slowed the game down just enough to piss off the veterans but added in too many features for the game to be any easier to learn for newbies, leading to the videogame equivalent of class warfare and perhaps the single most hostile enviroment I had ever had the displeasure of playing in. I'm glad the series is dead, despite how much I had once enjoyed it.
-
Woah. Back in the Starcraft days I used to bitch about getting slapped around by maphackers and having battle.net go down more times than a seasick hooker at a paraplegic's convention. But you definitely win. Yikes.
-
Heh, okay, perhaps I was being a bit melodramatic, but that's really part of what made it so bad: Tribes 2 had drama queens like me running around with spinfusors ruining everything!
-
Pissier than NMA? Surely you jest.
Actually NMA isn't that terrible. It's RPG Codex that gives NMA its bile-black color.
You know what game I hated? Dungeon Siege 2. I actually bought it on a whim, took it home and it was like a terrible game turned into a Uwe Boll movie then turned into a game again (except, Boll is actually making a Dungeon Siege movie, last time I checked)
-
Well, here's the thing about the NMA guys: No matter how much they bitch, they can't really ruin Fallout itself for anyone. It's a single player game, thank god. Tribes, on the other hand, had no real single player content to speak of, so you either managed to get your friends together or else you fended for yourself amongst the ravening mouthbreathers that polluted the community.
-
Pissier than NMA? Surely you jest.
Here's the wiki article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribalwar) on the largest of the fan sites. Currently it's the 16th largest video game forum on the net. But, at the time, it was probably in the top 3 since most of the forums that are now larger either didn't exist or hadn't been around that long. Lots of extremely vocal, angry people make for some huge drama.
Tycho from Penny Arcade called the 'hardcore' group at Tribalwar.com a "whiners choir (http://www.penny-arcade.com/2002/04/10)" because they were in favor of faster gameplay whereas he wanted more vehicles, bigger bases, etc. (http://www.penny-arcade.com/2002/04/08) Personally, I was one of the people complaining about the capped speed. It was what made the game more interesting for me, not being able to drive 51321 types of vehicles (http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/1999/01/20) or hang out in a huge base. If I had wanted something like that I would've been playing Battlefield, which was released at roughly the same time.
-
I'm honestly surprised that no-body has mentioned The Sims and all of the bastard offspring yet. I just don't understand how anyone can garner any sort of enjoyment from that game. Although, if you're in a relationship and your significant other has that game, chances are that they'll make a little loved up couple and a family, and then drown you in the pool or kill you via some other virtual method when you do something wrong or split up with them.
-
I like the Sims, but then I'm the sort of person that made the Tycoon series into a sleeper hit. I just build houses and try playing around with various interior design schemes rather than ever actually you know, goof around with the Sims themselves. I've had some interesting conversations with people on the subject of the Sims, and it helped me understand why so many people believe gamers to be socially maladjusted in general. There are times where it seems like most gamers are entirely uninterested in sandbox gameplay until they figure out you can trap people and watch them slowly die or gun down hookers in GTA.
-
I also hate any game that requires grinding to play properly, ie any MMO or JRPG.
I don't envy JRPG designers; balancing those games for the mass audience has to be a real pain in the ass. For example, there's the guys like my brother; not big on risk taking and end up grinding because they prefer to treat items as emergency measures. Then there's players like me: people who pretty much never grind and routinely run from about half the fights in any given JRPG while tearing through rare expendable items as if they were a dime a dozen, often beating the game while severely "underleveled" by many people's standards. It sounds great, but anyone who plays that way will someday learn the hard way that they are merely one poorly chosen save point away from backtracking and replaying chunks of the game. And then there's the third guy; willing to grind like my brother but downs expendable items as quickly as I do. Trying to keep the game challenging for all three types of players has to be damn near impossible. Do it badly and you get the guys in group 1 saying the game is too tedious, the guys in group 2 saying the game is too "cheap" or frustrating and the guys in group 3 saying the game is both too tedious AND too easy. Honestly, they're never going to be able to fix this balancing issue until they figure out a way to make JRPGS something other than resource management simulators, and doing that would risk pissing off the entire fanbase.
MMOs, on the other hand, are just plain evil. I mean, honestly now, some form of grinding or another is basically built right into the developer's business model.