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Transistor is one of the most inventive games I've played in a very long time, but holy poo poo what a clusterfuck of a story. People who have played Transistor, could you please answer for me any of these questions: -What did the Camerada want? -What were the Camerada trying to do? -How/why did the Process go rogue? If it was because the Camerada took the Transistor out of its cradle, why did they do that? -Why is the identity of the Transistor presented as a mystery when Red knows exactly who it is? And it's not even a reveal of any kind? -What exactly did the Camerada need Red's voice for? -Why did killing Red's lover cause the Camerada to lose control of the Transistor?
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Jul 27, 2014 02:26
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Mokinokaro posted:You missed a bit, but there is a lot open to interpretation. I'll break it down as much as I can remember. Oxxidation posted:Ok there are your answers hope you liked them byyeeee OK, that all makes sense, but is that all supposed to be deduced from the function inspects?
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Jul 27, 2014 03:32
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I guess my problem with Transistor's storytelling is that it wants to have an enigmatic, exploration-based story in game that is both A) completely linear, and B) heavily plot-driven. Exploration-based storytelling worked in games like Myst and Gone Home because by the time the game started, the story was effectively over, you were just picking up the pieces. You could uncover the mystery at your own pace, letting the parts of the puzzle fall into place. Transistor shoves you at 50mph down a corridor, directing you to visit Mr. Whosit and Mrs. What, neither of whom you know the first thing about beyond that they're bad. Things are happening for no obvious reason, and you're not going to get the plot at all unless you're spending more time reading than actually playing. The fact of the matter is that Transistor is plotted like a thriller, and you just can't reconcile that with a subtle, up-for-interpretation, exploration-based story.
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Jul 27, 2014 03:52
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Tiggum posted:And when you created customised characters they started out incredibly weak and could only be improved by playing as them in story mode. To get a single custom character up to a usable level would mean playing through about two thirds of the story. If you want more than one or two custom characters that you can use against the built-in ones, forget it. The more recent ones definitely don't have that, you can create wrestlers with absolutely jacked stats with zero balancing whatsoever. But yeah, unlocking the wrestlers is lame, even moreso when you consider that some of the newer ones (maybe all) have an "unlock everything" DLC you can buy.
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Jul 29, 2014 05:13
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Far Cry 3 is the game Far Cry 1 wanted to be anyway.
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Jul 31, 2014 05:30
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It's almost like a device designed specifically for playing games is better for playing games than a text-entry device and a menu-navigation device. 
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Jul 31, 2014 06:08
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WHAT A GOOD DOG posted:Farcry 3 was good, so was Blood Dragon. Crytek didn't do FC3.
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Jul 31, 2014 14:42
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Sardonik posted:For most quality genres, the keyboard and mouse are vastly superior. 
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Jul 31, 2014 16:18
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SpookyLizard posted:Thats my point. It is dumb that they changed the design to include something youd always want (joysticks!), and then still have a bunch buttons that you cant use while using the sticks. I'd rather have that then a setup which doesn't utilize my most powerful opposable digit at all unless I've got a specialty mouse.
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Jul 31, 2014 21:13
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SpookyLizard posted:Do you mean your only opposable digit? I have two thumbs, and am right handed. Your thumbs have got the most fine control of your fingers, and K+M leaves the right thumb totally unused. Like, imagine if you had to steer your car with your elbows, and nobody questioned this.
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Aug 1, 2014 02:36
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Away all Goats posted:Sounds like you want this That's getting there, but a trackball is still a little redundant strapped to a mouse, as far as gaming goes. The ideal piece of equipment would be if that trackball was replaced with a gamepad thumbstick, something that can just be held in one direction. Of course, that could also gently caress with your ability to move the mouse, since that does use your thumb... maybe if there were little slings for your fingers to slip into? Like a glove strapped to the mouse? It would probably be the gooniest looking thing ever, but it would probably be pretty great to play any kind of shooter or RPG with. Actually, on reflection, I can't imagine it not being really weird to use. Just move your mouse around a bit, noticing how dependent you really are on your thumb to move it. With a trackpad/mouse combo, it's usually intended for CADD users, so you generally aren't using both at the same time, you just want something that can be either. Maybe if it was like a PSP slider stick, mounted directly to the side? But then moving the mouse could mess with that control. DStecks has a new favorite as of 03:41 on Aug 1, 2014 |
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Aug 1, 2014 03:38
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Tiggum posted:How do you use a mouse? Exclusively with my fingertips.
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Aug 1, 2014 04:50
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SpookyLizard posted:Except you dont use your fingers at all to control the mouse, Yes, I do.
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Aug 2, 2014 01:49
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Doctor Bishop posted:Not to contribute to that idiotic derail, but on the topic of fine control, a thing drags a lot of PC shooters down for me is mouse acceleration. I mean, is it really so hard to include an option to turn that nonsense off, even if it's just in a .cfg or .ini file? It may be great for when you're using the mouse cursor for most other things, but when playing a game that requires the kinds of mouse movements that shooters do, it just makes things so much harder than they need to be. A particularly bad example would have to be F.E.A.R. 2, since the first F.E.A.R. not only had an option to turn mouse acceleration off, it even had a slider to determine exactly how much mouse acceleration you want if you're the kind of person who actually likes mouse acceleration for some reason, but not the second one. Nope. No such options here. There's really no excuse at all for non-rebindable controls or bullshit like this; it's been the standard for over a decade. And honestly, I don't really get why strategy games always seem to get away with non-rebindable controls. I just want WASD camera control, damnit! 
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Aug 2, 2014 04:42
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scarycave posted:Frankly, I think the main problem with that kind of stuff is that their trying to be somewhat dynamic with the dialogue but there pretty much anchored down by voice acting stuff. Yeah, I can appreciate the effort, but because of the limitations of a voice-acted game it just means that you get to hear one extra bit of chatter now and then ("I've heard of your honeyed words!").
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Aug 4, 2014 01:51
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Captain Lavender posted:Mass Effect 1 has a ton of little problems, but I just blitzed through the game, and the one that really stuck in my craw was item management. I will never understand the people who thought that Mass Effect 2 was in any way inferior to the original. For content, something from my childhood: the biggest problem in Freelancer is that it's a linear game that didn't want to chuck out the open world. The story is excellent, the rare video game conspiracy thriller that doesn't poo poo the bed with insane twists and dumb bullshit. And the missions are all fun and memorable, except for the obligatory racing mission. But in between the great bits are hours upon hours of repetitive money grinding until the next mission is unlocked. The side-missions are boring and unfun, and by the 3 hour mark (of a 40 hour+ game) you've already seen >80% of the side mission types. Running commodities (a major touted gameplay mechanic) is boring and doesn't pay. Piracy (another touted feature) basically pisses off 90% of the factions in the game making it nonviable. Smuggling is just about impossible to get into, is very dangerous, and it's borderline impossible to complete the routes that actually pay. And that's it. Those are your four options for money grinding, and they all suck.
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Aug 4, 2014 05:45
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FredMSloniker posted:And on the flipside of your complaints, you can only access about a quarter of the open world, total, before you finish the storyline (and generally you're confined to a much smaller space). Then it's like 'hey, play Elite, go nuts', only you're probably sick of the game by that point, plus you have some of the best equipment in the game. For anybody not familiar with the development of the game, here's the gist of why Freelancer is a bit scattered about what it wants to be: it spent most of its development wanting to be basically a proto-EVE Online, but the tech just didn't exist in 2002 and so the studio ran out of money; Microsoft bought them up and told them to stop developing new features and just polish what was already done. The result is that Freelancer is crazy polished, but pretty barren. The weapons are also balanced completely for the campaign, and not at all for any kind of true open world balance. The weapons get better as you travel through the storyline, and the result is that when you finish the campaign, you've got the best ship and best weapons in the game, period, with nowhere to go. And, infuriatingly, there is no "ship storage" system or anything, so if you want to replace the uber-ship you get in the endgame, you can never get it back. There's also really nothing to spend your money on, since again, when you finish the game you've got the best of the best of everything, so there is no real reason to continue playing beyond exploration, which in Freelancer is a nice way of saying putting on cruise control and flying in a straight line for 10 minutes+. I rant, but honestly Freelancer is one of my favourite games ever, because the campaign and core gameplay are just that drat good. Best way to play it is with free money cheats, so you can skip the side missions entirely.
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Aug 4, 2014 06:51
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People always rattle off poo poo ME2 cut out from ME1, as if everything they're listing wasn't padding and bullshit that made ME1 a loving slog of a game.
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Aug 4, 2014 19:37
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Sardonik posted:ME2 does most things better than ME1, except the dialogue, plot This is just plain wrong, period. Mass Effect 2 has one of the best video game plots of all time from a design standpoint. ME1 is a very typical "bop from plot point to plot point as the talking heads tell you what hoops you need to jump through next" video game plot. I guess it passes for good since most video games have a lovely talking-heads-hoop-jumping plot. ME2 gives you an objective: "Go through the Mass Relay of Doom, find out what the gently caress is on the other side", and then tells you what you need to do to achieve it: "assemble your team", and then it turns you loose to accomplish your mission. It puts the player in the driver's seat of the story and gives them a sense of agency most games don't even realize that they should be delivering.
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Aug 5, 2014 01:18
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It always seems like 90% of the criticisms of ME2 are "It wasn't what I thought it would be/ isn't what I think it should be". Which is exactly as legitimate a criticism as saying "Inglouruous Basterds was awful because it should have been an action movie".
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Aug 5, 2014 03:58
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Cleretic posted:I think it's fair enough to criticize ME2 from being too big a departure from the original. I liked ME1, a lot, and was hoping for another game like it, which isn't really something that exists. Instead I got Gears of War with RPG elements, and while it might be good at being Gears of War with RPG elements, that isn't what I expected, nor what I wanted. ME2 being a departure from ME1 is a 100% legit reason to not like ME2, but it is not a valid criticism; this is not splitting hairs or pedantry, that's a huge and important difference. ME1 has no bearing on the quality of ME2 because when evaluating quality a work must stand on its own. ...of SCIENCE! posted:Maybe if Roger Ebert wasn't so good at trolling gamers more of them would adopt his philosophy of reviewing things for what they are rather than what you wish they were. Thank you for getting it.
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Aug 5, 2014 05:25
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GIANT OUIJA BOARD posted:If we're judging it for what it is, then that ought to include how it presents itself, which is "as a continuation of Mass Effect." Drive was marketed heavily as an action film, despite not being one at all. Does that make it bad? Coming back to Inglourious Basterds, you could argue that the whole point of the film is that you're expecting it to be a rip-roaring action flick and it isn't. Is Inglourious Basterds bad for not being an action movie? I am not trying to tell you that you're wrong for not liking ME2, because reasons for liking something or not liking it can never be wrong. I am saying, though, that "this isn't what I thought it was/should be" is never a valid criticism, no matter how much you think it should be something else. Think of it this way: pretend I'm Mr. Mxyzptlk, and I use my reality warping magic to make all trace of ME1 vanish from existence. Would this mean that ME2 is now better? Because to me, that's self-evidently nonsense. And I don't want to single anybody out here, I think people confusing "this is bad" and "I didn't like it" is one of the biggest problems in video game criticism.
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Aug 5, 2014 18:25
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RyokoTK posted:They should have the next Assassin's Creed game take place in 1890's Minneapolis. For about a second my brain processed this as 1980's Milwaukee.
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Aug 10, 2014 19:16
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Tomb Raider '13 is a pretty decent game when it remembers it's a game, I just wish it would stop wrenching away my camera control every 30 seconds. It's painful to me, personally, because all I can see when it happens is all the money and man-hours that went into putting the camera in just the right place, to give you the most interesting possible view of what's happening, at the small cost of smashing the player's immersion with a sledgehammer. Like, I can't even say it's badly done, because yeah it really does show off what's happening, and achieve the intended goal of looking
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Aug 12, 2014 06:16
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Pocket Billiards posted:I felt this way too, it wasn't an issue in San Andreas because you were travelling to different locations as the story progressed. I could probably go on for hours about why GTAIV is an awful, awful game, but since this is supposed to be the "poo poo things about good games" thread, this probably isn't the place.
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Aug 13, 2014 15:39
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RyokoTK posted:There's nothing saying this thread is about good games, duder. I'll just give the highlights, trying to avoid the common criticisms (cell phone bugging from friends). 1) The game's missions are far too hard, and very rarely give the player a mid-mission checkpoint. Restarting a mission almost invariably means restarting it from the location of the mission-giver, not from where the mission actually begins, and often this is a considerable distance. On at least one occasion I had to completely redo a mission because I died on the drive home after completing the actual mission objectives. 2) Way too much content is hidden behind the missions, including large sections of the map, the annoyingness of which is exacerbated by the problems illustrated in point 1. There's nothing inherently wrong with walling off parts of an open world, but GTA IV doesn't have a very big game world to begin with. 3) Niko's story is poorly handled, as is his character in general. Open-world games work best when the player character's role in the world is clear: CJ is a gangbanger, Michael Townley is a bank robber, Trevor Phillips is a psychopath, Franklin Clinton is a car thief, Alex Mason is a terrorist, John Marston is an uwilling government assassin, etc. Niko Bellic is a taxi cab driver, and so his motivations for participating in crime are vague. His acts in the story missions all make sense in the context of what he wants, but during the freeplay, it makes no sense for him to be randomly carjacking people or doing any of the random crimes that GTA is fundamentally about. It's hard to get into the mind of Niko, since he just doesn't gel with GTA. 4) There's nothing to spend money on, and no way to reliably earn money besides missions. Anything you're likely to buy (clothes, food) costs a pittance, and all the high-end items are unattainably expensive. (I can't understand why there isn't a chop shop mechanic in the game, like what APB has. It would provide a way of making money that gels with the core gameplay concept of car theft.) 5) GTA IV is supposed to be a satire of the American Dream, and that's something that a GTA game could do really well, but GTA IV shoots itself in the foot immediately. There's basically two ways you can satirize the American Dream: A) it's hollow, or B) it's bullshit. A is the option very conducive to a GTA game, with the protagonist getting more and more money and more and more success, and finding that it hasn't solved his real problems at all, and even made them worse. That's a fantastic premise for a GTA game, and it is not what GTA IV does. The problem is that GTA IV always goes for the cheap, shallow criticism, and so within the first 10 minutes of the game, it's thrown down the gauntlet: the American Dream is bullshit, Roman lied about everything, Niko isn't any better off here than he was back home. The game makes its entire point before the first mission is over. Taking this angle immediately robs all momentum from the story, resulting in a game with a shambling, aimless pace. Things just sort of happen, and there's no really compelling dramatic hook for the player to get invested in. Contrast this with GTAV, a much tighter story, where everything happens because Michael desperately wants to be a good person, but he just isn't. That's a compelling narrative. 6) The carplay is really sloppy, and this is exacerbated by the entirety of the game taking place in a claustrophobic urban environment. Holding down the gas for any length of time gets you going faster than you ever want to, and it's impossible to corner at speed without using the handbrake, which is very difficult to use precisely. On a minor note, the car damage system is pretty wonky; it's almost impossible to drive anywhere without losing your hood. 7) It's way too easy to lose your wanted rating. Just drive in the same direction for a minute or two and you're practically guaranteed to escape. This and Point 6 are two places where GTAV massively improved on IV. 8) There's very little to actually do. GTA thrives on the dicking around, but in IV it just leans way too heavily on the players making their own fun, and puts almost no effort into giving them the tools to do that. The driving isn't very satisfying, the shooting isn't very satisfying, and it's hard to get creative when the whole game is a single environment. Again, GTAV is a significant improvement in this respect, with the random encounters and special off-limits areas both creating interesting things for players to do while aimlessly dicking around. GTAIV really suffers from a lack of aircraft, but it also feels like the play space is too small and constricted for aircraft to be all that interesting anyway.
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Aug 13, 2014 16:46
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spudsbuckley posted:R* are bad at satire. (That having been said, the idea that an expensive project can't be satirical is ridiculous hipster nonsense.) DStecks has a new favorite as of 22:47 on Aug 13, 2014 |
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Aug 13, 2014 22:41
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What it all comes back to is cheap cynicism. That's really all the "satire" and "social commentary" of GTA is.
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Aug 14, 2014 01:11
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Ratoslov posted:It's not just 'people are shallow'. It's more 'anybody who cares about literally anything ever is stupid for caring about it'. It's relentlessly nihilistic, in an extremely childish sort of way. It's like someone gave Holden Caulfeld and Tyler Durden a games studio. I nearly got completely turned off from Red Dead Redemption after the opening sequence was a barrage of vintage GTA smug cynicism, but thank gently caress the rest of the game wasn't nearly so bad. I mean, it still had a similar tone, but in RDR it came off more as stymied optimism than cheap cynicism.
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Aug 14, 2014 04:53
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ninjahedgehog posted:Red Dead Redemption stands head and shoulders above the GTA games because the writing, while still pretty cynical and nihilistic, seemed like it came from a place of honest love for the setting and genre rather than spite. Part of that is probably due to RDR having been developed in San Diego, whereas all the GTA games are made in Scotland. But yeah, Red Dead Redemption just has a lot more compassion for its characters than GTA ever has, and that's a lot of what makes up the tone of the game. It also helps that there's no radio in RDR, and so there's just nowhere for the quick-and-dirty cheap cynicism to go most of the time. What really stings about the shittiness of GTA's satire, though, is that every once in a while they hit on something that works, and it's really funny. I'm Rich from GTAIV was funny, because it was satirizing something legitimately silly in a way that was straight-faced instead of mugging-for-the-camera-winky-winky-this-is-lovely like GTA usually does in its attempt to satirize absolutely everything.
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Aug 14, 2014 05:35
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Cleretic posted:Yeah I said 'since San Andreas' and I intended that to include San Andreas. Tommy Vercetti is literally the only time they got this right. Uh, Trevor? Even with Michael it's justified in that he's clearly as much a violent psychopath as Trevor is, he just really wishes he wasn't.
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Aug 16, 2014 13:40
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Action Tortoise posted:This is one of the worst things in V. Two out of three chases were follow missions until the target crashed into something and fifteen minutes into the third one I realized that the game wanted me to actually kill the guy. There's not really that many chases in V, though. And even though they're never clear about which is which, I'd argue that the game plays so much more smoothly than IV that sometimes you just don't notice because the chase goes off without a hitch anyway.
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Aug 17, 2014 21:13
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I don't get why more games don't let you supplement the in-game radio with your own music. Battlefield Vietnam did it, but I haven't seen it in any game since, even now that GTA has made in-game radios a staple feature of open world games. Like, it makes sense if you're doing a period piece or the radio exists to set a tone (Fallout or The Saboteur, for example), but it seems like something that should be pretty easy to code; unless you're doing weird poo poo like how GTA's radio stations are just a single massive audio file that loops, and in that case don't do that, that's weird. On modern hardware, how much efficiency are you really getting out of not having to load an audio file every 3 minutes?
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Sep 26, 2014 19:12
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Danger - Octopus! posted:Not for the character necessarily. He's Irish, and they were neutral. Yeah it's kind of one of his central character traits that he has no love whatsoever for England or the Allies, and it's unsubtly implied that he picked up his sabotage skills from the IRA. So yeah, he gives not one single poo poo about the war, and frankly, that's more than a little refreshing when you're telling a WWII story.
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Sep 28, 2014 22:05
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There's a walljump in Super Metroid? poo poo, now I know why I never beat the thing.  (just on an emulator, I'm sure if I'd owned it back in the day I'd have tried for more than an hour before forgetting about it)
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Sep 30, 2014 05:09
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Captain Lavender posted:Steve Blum is a little thing that drags down about 90% of the games I play. Steve Blum isn't as super-saturated as he used to be. Right now my personal TDTGD is Troy Baker. If he's the player character, that means roughly 100% of the time that the devs didn't give a hot wet poo poo about character or story, because out of all the voice actors they could have chose, they made the conscious decision to pick "default white guy". And it's not that the man can't act, he's great in Fullmetal Alchemist, but he is every single shooter PC now. Like, Nolan North gets stick, but he's basically just Desmond and Drake, both significantly different characters. Troy Baker is The Grizzled Brown-Haired Five-O-Clock-Shadow White Guy voice. poptart_fairy posted:That cracked me up about SW:TOR. There was a PCGamer UK article where Bioware reps were going on about how they saved 500k or so on the budget by reusing dialogue lines, but skimped over how much the entire budget was - reputedly around 200 million. Now to be fair, voice acting represents a great deal of money sunk into a single element, and 500k could stretch pretty far over other aspects of development; and from a business perspective it's 500k less that they need to make to turn a profit, which is a lot of video game copies.
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Oct 7, 2014 17:22
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Also am I weird or does motion blur in PC games always always always look awful? Like, nausea-inducing.
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Oct 7, 2014 18:59
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Yeah, that's always bugged me about the AC series. You've devoted your life to becoming an instrument of death, and you're marginally better at parkour than the contemporary equivalent of beat cops. The problem with guards being too good at parkour is that it's pretty much the only workable solution to the design choices they made. They decided that parkour would simply be a matter of holding the parkour button and moving in a direction, which means that the very act of parkour is not engaging to the player, and this, I believe, is the critical mistake that belies the whole system. If parkouring from building to building is not in of itself a challenge, then some challenge must be introduced, since parkour constitutes the majority of playtime. Guards on rooftops introduces the necessary element of challenge, at the cost of devaluing parkour. If climbing and leaping required player skill, then you could get away with guards who can't keep up, because the very act of getting away would present challenge.
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Oct 12, 2014 01:20
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SpookyLizard posted:I remember early on when they talked about making the parkour really straightforward and simple because of how much parkour you'd be doing, having it be more complex would hinder gameplay. I think they shot themselves in the foot with that though, because they've sorta weakened it. The mistake was not realizing that the parkour could be the gameplay. Aleph Null posted:Are you saying it should have been more like Mirror's Edge? Yes because Mirror's Edge is the only platformer in the history of video games
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Oct 12, 2014 06:07
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Yeah, the discovery of alchemic properties is kinda the fun of the system. I very deliberately don't write down properties or make any effort to remember them so potionmaking stays fresh. (IIRC there's a perk that makes eating an ingredient reveal two properties, but hilariously it's at the end of the alchemy perk tree so if you can unlock it you've almost certainly discovered the properties of every ingredient by then.)
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Oct 13, 2014 18:18
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