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Lord Lambeth posted:I don't get why people get so angry about early access games but on the few early access games I have bought I haven't really gotten burned. I'll be over here with my prison architect and kerbal space program, thank you. Its because a lot of early access games completely fail to live up to their promises or in some cases outright fall apart. Starbound has been in development for ages and the devs have changed huge portions of the game from what was originally promised, much to the ire of many fans. Then you have games like the Stomping Ground where the devs basically took the money they got from it and ran, completely abandoning the project entirely. Personally I haven't participated in EA much because I like playing games when they are complete. The only EA game I've bought is Darkest Dungeon, and that's because the devs released a good chunk of the game that is stable and well made.
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May 1, 2015 17:17
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Choco1980 posted:I think my worst guide I ever bought was the Prima book for Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete. All the maps were hand drawn and only vaguely correct (including enemy placement). Like, it was painfully obvious they couldn't get the rights to print any images from the game in the book. It was awful. Which is only vaguely surprising, because the actual Official Strategy Guides for SSSC and EB are absolutely fantastic, super-detailed and with a ton of humor and jokes in them. I guess Prima was just trying to piggyback onto them and get some uninformed purchases.
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May 1, 2015 18:07
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Lord Lambeth posted:I don't get why people get so angry about early access games but on the few early access games I have bought I haven't really gotten burned. I'll be over here with my prison architect and kerbal space program, thank you. There are many really good early access games, you just have to realize that there's way more chances for things to go wrong with early access and have to be more careful. Getting an EA game is not like buying something that's been released and reviewed--you're buying a beta and a work in progress, and if you don't know the developer then they could be really scummy, or could even be peter molyneux. I've had great experiences with nuclear throne, crypt of the necrodancer and grim dawn (which are the only EA games I've bought) so I think there's merit to the system and a lot of devs really do it right. But as a consumer you have to be much more careful.
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May 1, 2015 18:20
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When Diablo 3 came out, my roommate at the time (who was suuuuuuuuper old-fashioned and used to manage a GameStop, like you do) bought me the guide book for it. PC games especially being what they are these days, virtually all the information in it was outdated before it was printed. I don't really understand how there's still a market for video game guide books.
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May 1, 2015 18:24
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It might make more sense for console games, which aren't constantly getting patched. I'm playing through Bayonetta right now and the amazing guide book is crazy bonkers expensive. I guess that is a video game troll.
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May 1, 2015 18:34
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Guides from companies like FuturePress are pretty good; they only do guides for a few games and they put a lot of effort into making sure that the information is well presented and accurate. The FuturePress guide for Bloodborne was actually released like a month after Bloodborne came out, because FP wanted to make sure that they could accurately reflect all the changes that would happen in the day 1 patch for BB. DoubleJump, before they fell apart, used to make really solid guides for Nippon Ichi games like Disgaea. Unfortunately, there wasn't much of a market and so they transitioned to ebook guides and then went out of business entirely after Disgaea 3; I think Prima tried to do a guide for Disgaea 4 or Disgaea D2, and it was okay but not nearly up to the standards that DoubleJump had set. It can be helpful to have all the information for a game laid out in a manner that's easier to read than some 17 year old's ascii formatting. But companies like prima just churn out really useless crap. If you compare the FP Bayonetta guide with the Prima Bayonetta 2 guide, you can really see the difference. They're superficially similar, but Prima elected to lay out the information for each encounter in the level in essentially a random place on the page. The maps of each level include numbers to indicate that there's an encounter or a collectible, but the numbers are assigned in completely random orders and you have to reference a table to figure out what each one is. So if you're trying to run through the level and hit each encounter sequentially (which you need to do to get the highest score for that level), you have to read through the entire table to figure out which encounter comes next and where you need to backtrack. It's dumb. Coca Koala has a new favorite as of 18:37 on May 1, 2015 |
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May 1, 2015 18:34
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Internet Kraken posted:Its because a lot of early access games completely fail to live up to their promises or in some cases outright fall apart. Starbound has been in development for ages and the devs have changed huge portions of the game from what was originally promised, much to the ire of many fans. Then you have games like the Stomping Ground where the devs basically took the money they got from it and ran, completely abandoning the project entirely. There was also that one dwarf fortess clone Towns, released in EA on Steam. Stopped updating leaving the game broken as hell, and the dev had the hilarious audacity to announce they were working on a sequel. And the Paranautical Activity development team had that schism when the one guy had a meltdown and sent a death threat to Gabe Newell because their game officially released out of EA, but someone at steam accidentally advertised it as a new EA title. His reason for wanting Gabe dead was "Early Access doesn't sell." Nevermind that the developers hyped the hell out of multiplayer basically since day one but never actually implemented it during early access at all.
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May 1, 2015 18:36
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Internet Kraken posted:Its because a lot of early access games completely fail to live up to their promises or in some cases outright fall apart. Starbound has been in development for ages and the devs have changed huge portions of the game from what was originally promised, much to the ire of many fans. Then you have games like the Stomping Ground where the devs basically took the money they got from it and ran, completely abandoning the project entirely. It is my understanding that all game development is about planning to build a rocket that goes to the moon and actually making a crappy wooden plane that only flys a few feet. But usually that is a internal debate on what gets done. With crowd funding you get to see just how much gets cut.
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May 1, 2015 18:38
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Guidechat: The comprehensive Skyrim guide is super useful because Skyrim hates alt-tabbing and will more often than not crash or black-screen you if you try. I've got the guide next to my desk and I've referenced it about 5 or 6 times in the past couple of days when the game glitched out and wasn't showing my objective markers on the world map and I needed to know where to go and what to do on some quests. Trolls: Towns and SpaceBase DF9. Two early access games that were abandoned by the developers and widely suck. They bilked tons of people out of their money, and essentially hosed off with it. Towns was hilariously broken as stated earlier in the thread, but SpaceBase was such a sad story. It was regularly updated for a while, and it had a ton of promise as a "Dwarf Fortress in Space" kind of deal. Then one day the developers stopped responding to forum posts, dropped the project mid-development, and had the balls to announce they're taking what they learned and making a new game out of it. Keep in mind they never actually delivered the game they promised as part of early access. They just took hundreds of thousands of dollars and parachuted out of the plane.
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May 1, 2015 18:53
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Internet Kraken posted:Its because a lot of early access games completely fail to live up to their promises or in some cases outright fall apart. Starbound has been in development for ages and the devs have changed huge portions of the game from what was originally promised, much to the ire of many fans. Then you have games like the Stomping Ground where the devs basically took the money they got from it and ran, completely abandoning the project entirely. Also because it's equal parts funny and sad that people with Steam libraries full of hundreds of unfinished and unplayed games are paying almost full price (or, in the case of games like Star Citizen or the numerous f2p EA games like Z1N1, paying more than the cost of the finished game) for the privelege of fiddling around with a beta/alpha/pre-alpha and the promise that if the stars align they might get a finished game years later. Best case scenario the game is finished and great but you'be already burned yourself out on the core gameplay long ago. Worst case scenario they just dump the unfinished game and you get nothing. And either way, it's gonna wind up in a bundle or hugely discounted on sale just to drive home how bad you got ripped off for not having impulse control.
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May 1, 2015 19:02
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One of my favorite guidebook trolls is for Pokémon Red/Blue, where it suggests using your Master Ball "for a hard to find Pokémon", and then gives a relatively common species as an example.
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May 1, 2015 19:20
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Sometimes early access is dirt cheap which makes sense. You're taking a gamble and basically working as a beta tester so you get a discount. I don't really get the early access games that want you to pay full price for half a game that might never come out.
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May 1, 2015 19:22
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SirPhoebos posted:One of my favorite guidebook trolls is for Pokémon Red/Blue, where it suggests using your Master Ball "for a hard to find Pokémon", and then gives a relatively common species as an example. A motherfuckin zubat
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May 1, 2015 19:35
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I used my Master Ball on the very first Pokemon I encountered after getting it. Oh to be 11 again.
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May 1, 2015 19:45
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I don't even know what to do tell you if you didn't abuse the MissingNo glitch to get infinite master balls (or whatever other item was in your 6th slot)
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May 1, 2015 20:03
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Light Gun Man posted:The real troll here is the guide the game comes with has the WRONG INFO about this and instead tells you it drops from an enemy you can fight like maybe three or four times max and then have to reload a save to try again including walking all the way back to that screen so you waste a bunch of time on something that's actually impossible. Additional troll: the goddamned scratch n' sniff card that came with the game, so that both the game and guidebook forever smelled like Cool Raunch Doritos.
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May 1, 2015 20:22
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You can't mention lovely/trolling guide books without mentioning the Pokémon Red/Blue guide:     e: probably already posted in the thread, but it's too great to not repost.
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May 1, 2015 21:43
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I would've been so pissed if Team Rocket could actually steal your Pokemans.
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May 1, 2015 22:20
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HonorableTB posted:Skyrim hates alt-tabbing and will more often than not crash or black-screen you if you try. There's a known bug with texture reloading that makes it hang like that.Tab out of the black screen and then back to it to fix it. Your Computer posted:You can't mention lovely/trolling guide books without mentioning the Pokémon Red/Blue guide: Holy poo poo, so THAT'S where the stupid catch-rate down+b rumor came from.
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May 1, 2015 22:57
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The strategy guide outright lies?! 
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May 1, 2015 23:14
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Lies and made up bullshit, sounds like typical behavior of the kind of person that picks charmander to me, yeah.
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May 1, 2015 23:17
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May favourite troll is that they named a character Poo and expected people to take them half seriously.
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May 1, 2015 23:26
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HonorableTB posted:I don't even know what to do tell you if you didn't abuse the MissingNo glitch to get infinite master balls (or whatever other item was in your 6th slot) we didn't know about missingno when we were 8 dude Your Computer posted:You can't mention lovely/trolling guide books without mentioning the Pokémon Red/Blue guide: this owns lol
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May 1, 2015 23:46
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forbidden lesbian posted:we didn't know about missingno when we were 8 dude I did  Everyone in my school had max masterballs and full legendary team.
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May 1, 2015 23:51
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i knew about missingno when i was 8  *excuse me I was 9 when the game was released
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May 1, 2015 23:52
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Tiberius Thyben posted:Your problem is calling buying an early access game 'investing'. It's just buying a game earlier than usual, in an unfinished state. I've bought a several early access games without regret, I know they're a risk and may not deliver but offering support to make their goal happen will only make it happen for them more of a reality. Spacebase DF-9 is a good example of how a highly publicised early access game can go down the tubes, but they were honest and upfront in saying that they're losing money developing it. Not only did they wrap up what they had done, they released the code so other people can do what they want with it and still continued to patch the core game several times to fix bugs and issues. Godus on the other hand is a different matter entirely, the budget was set and the game was released early. When I started playing it the loading screen said it was only 22% done or such like, no biggie I understood that I'd reach a point where it would stop. For several months it was at 22%. Turns out people were pissed about stuff not in the game so they spent those months redesigning the entire game to implement things instead of spending the time just designing them into what they already have as an update. The result was an overhauled mouse system, weather changes, a new sticker system and less advancement. Please delete your save file, you still can't quit the game unless you ctrl+alt+delete. The next update was a complete redesign of the engine, nothing new was added, they decided to change what was there. Then added timed mini-games instead of untimed ones. The starting location was on an entirely new map, so delete your save game and start again. The whole control system was completely redesigned and the main storyline had more cuts. Plus they restricted levels of landscape which you could move which made you less God-like. You still can't quit the game unless you ctrl+alt+delete. The next update pretty much turned the whole thing into a pay to win game. The whole update was fixated on making the game into a mobile phone application. The game is barely through production after a year and already they're targeting the mobile phone market. Their pay to win mobile app solution? Turn the PC version that was originally intended and marketed towards into a pay to win game. 'You don't have enough stickers to unlock something because we don't give you enough to do so, throw us some extra cash to unlock them for you." It was at this update that I threw in the towel, I knew they intended to market this game to mobile devices but not turn the PC version into a larger mobile application. Now they've made these changes, you still can't quit the game unless you ctrl+alt+delete. In the two years I've owned this game, there's been barely any progress, just changes to the engine and system and not working on fixing any issues that are relevant or adding more content. The most focused change I've seen is in making this unmoveable mass available to Android and iOs users. Two loving years and this game is still barely playable and I've seen more about getting it into Play stores than anything about finishing the game or actually doing something new with it instead of changing core features that were promised and not delivered. "We've added plantable trees which we promised, you'll have to delete your save game to have them. You'll still need to ctrl+alt+delete to exit the game though." I have no issues with early access games, Pixel Pracy, DayZ and the like are fun to play even if they're unfinished. But Godus, even if it doesn't deliver it's original intent, is the biggest troll as it's consistently just thrown a middle finger at every opportunity. After two years I'd hope to have something that was playable to some extent. Yet all there is is some basic gameplay which was abandoned to make the abandoned gameplay more widespread on other platforms. Now I've typed all this crap up I'm kinda expecting it to end up on a "This Troper" Youtube video. Godus just sucks rear end, the whole development has been troll-like from the start. It was my first early access game and I've been part of others which are doing far better jobs of theirs.
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May 1, 2015 23:53
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I love strategy guides. I would read them like books, even for games I didn't own. The Secret of Mana guide is basically written like a fiction piece that covers all the actions that should be taken, and it's a pretty good way of conveying the information since there isn't a bunch of super secret junk hidden in chests. I can't remember what the maps were like, if there were any. I do know that the had lines of all the sprites used in each of the charge attacks, which was nice to look at even though it wasn't particularly helpful. The SaGa games always made good guide purchases. The games themselves (SaGa Frontier 1 and 2, Romancing SaGa (PS2)) can be difficult to really understand without a little guidance, and I pity the person who tried to play Unlimited SaGa blind. That's my troll. Unlimited SaGa for the PlayStation 2. What series of meetings went on that resulted in that unfriendly mess? p.s.: 
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May 2, 2015 00:59
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LawfulWaffle posted:p.s.: Hey man, don't knock Worlds Of Power, those books were great. in third grade Ninja Gaiden is the first book I read cover to cover. I always regret I never got the Metal Gear one, I always wondered how crazy it would end up being. Castlevania II was the weirdest one though, where the story has this schoolkid who plays a lot of Nintendo and is hooked on chocolate getting sucked into the game and fighting alongside Simon Belmont, where they're also plagued by the Seven Deadly Sins as well as the game's plot.
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May 2, 2015 01:27
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My favourite strategy guide was the Nintendo Power guide for Paper Mario: the Thousand-Year Door. It wasn't aggressively comprehensive, but it was funny as all get out and had all the pertinent little secrets you probably would have missed playing blind. "Those of you born in the Cold War era may wish to hide under your tables for the next scene." 
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May 2, 2015 01:29
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Choco1980 posted:Hey man, don't knock Worlds Of Power, those books were great. in third grade Ninja Gaiden is the first book I read cover to cover. I always regret I never got the Metal Gear one, I always wondered how crazy it would end up being. Castlevania II was the weirdest one though, where the story has this schoolkid who plays a lot of Nintendo and is hooked on chocolate getting sucked into the game and fighting alongside Simon Belmont, where they're also plagued by the Seven Deadly Sins as well as the game's plot. 1-Up actually tracked down and interviewed the guy who made them, it's a pretty interesting read.
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May 2, 2015 01:37
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Choco1980 posted:Hey man, don't knock Worlds Of Power, those books were great. in third grade Ninja Gaiden is the first book I read cover to cover. I always regret I never got the Metal Gear one, I always wondered how crazy it would end up being. Castlevania II was the weirdest one though, where the story has this schoolkid who plays a lot of Nintendo and is hooked on chocolate getting sucked into the game and fighting alongside Simon Belmont, where they're also plagued by the Seven Deadly Sins as well as the game's plot. I bought the castlevania novella from a book fair, hadn't thought of it until now. Shame I didn't know about there being a Metal Gear title, probably would've enjoyed that
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May 2, 2015 01:39
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Sleeveless posted:1-Up actually tracked down and interviewed the guy who made them, it's a pretty interesting read. Good man. The Bionic Commando book was one of the first I read and I really liked it; I think it was the first book I read as a kid where someone actually killed someone else in a fight instead of something like GI Joe stun lasers. There was also some book based on an stealth jet that I remember vaguely.
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May 2, 2015 01:41
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Internet Kraken posted:Its because a lot of early access games completely fail to live up to their promises or in some cases outright fall apart. Starbound has been in development for ages and the devs have changed huge portions of the game from what was originally promised, much to the ire of many fans. Then you have games like the Stomping Ground where the devs basically took the money they got from it and ran, completely abandoning the project entirely. Cracked has an article today based on an interview with two of the guys who made Daikatana, and they actually talk about facing somethig like this. With regular game development you can cut back and change things without issue during development, but Daikatana's really early advertisement and hype locked them into expectations that they couldn't feasibly meet. Some early access games might be running into the same issues; we're seeing things before we really should be, so the usual process of 'well, that's not working, let's get rid of it/change it' doesn't work as well as it should.
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May 2, 2015 01:52
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Cheating in pokemon was great because everyone had these mewtwos and charizards they got to level 100 from level 1 with infinite rare candies whereas my pokemon were legitimately leveled up and thus I could kick their asses with my Articuno and Venusaur. It also helped that no one understood ice type murdered dragons so your Dragonite will not save you. Somehow I never hosed up my save (other than the elite 4 stats thing) loving around with missingo. Regarding Worlds of Power, was that the one that had some Blaster Master books that actually ascended to being canon in the sequel games?
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May 2, 2015 01:59
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Somewhere in storage I'm pretty sure I still have the Blaster Master, Ninja Gaidan, Metal Gear and Castlevania books. I remember them being the bees knees back in 4th grade and I won't hear otherwise. 7th grade me also read a handful of Resident Evil novels and the first Doom book.
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May 2, 2015 02:17
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forbidden lesbian posted:we didn't know about missingno when we were 8 dude I was the only 6th grader in my elementary school that seemed to know about them and I also had tons of level 99 Bulbasaurs that for some reason no one wanted
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May 2, 2015 02:31
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While we're talking about bad guides, I'd like to point out that the Dragon Quest VIII Brady Games guide is pretty terrible for a couple of reasons. First of all, the actual walk through portion of the guide is literally just a bunch of maps with some tiny paragraphs to explain events extremely vague terms to prevent SPOILERS. Also, town maps don't even show where items or even point out key areas of the map. Town maps just give you a list of items and hope you run around the entirety of town to find each item. Another reason why the guide sucks is that it basically just tells you a recommended level and will tell you that boss is going to be hard and leave you to figure out the boss yourself. This is kinda annoying when the second boss of the game has a dumb gimmick where you have to defend every third round when the boss does a move that hits the party for 3/4's of their hp. Oh and did I mention that is doesn't cover anything in post game? Because the only place it lists anything about the post-game is in the boss and item indexes in a shhh shhh fashion.
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May 2, 2015 03:36
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Light Gun Man posted:Cheating in pokemon was great because everyone had these mewtwos and charizards they got to level 100 from level 1 with infinite rare candies whereas my pokemon were legitimately leveled up and thus I could kick their asses with my Articuno and Venusaur. 
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May 2, 2015 04:33
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Light Gun Man posted:Cheating in pokemon was great because everyone had these mewtwos and charizards they got to level 100 from level 1 with infinite rare candies whereas my pokemon were legitimately leveled up and thus I could kick their asses with my Articuno and Venusaur. I was lucky enough not to gently caress my cart with Missingno, but I did get a Level 255 Blastoise that ruined everyone's poo poo 
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May 2, 2015 04:51
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Looking at Pokemon and Final Fantasy 6 makes you really appreciate modern RPGs. Like, yeah, Skyrim had some glitches that made some quests freak out but at least it didn't have entire stats and status effects that were completely worthless thanks to a mistake by the programmers.
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May 2, 2015 05:16
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