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CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...

Inspector Gesicht posted:

rear end Creed 4: No game has ever been improved by forcing you to interact with French-Canadians.

NHL 94 on Sega Genesis?

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CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...
I just started* playing Disgaea 5, and outside of the awful, awful story, I was having a lot of fun making numbers go up, mostly because there were so many ways to do it, and no matter what I did it seemed like I made some progress. Whenever I got bored of the lovely anime about friendship, I could level up some items, subdue innocents, find new weapons, learn skills, unlock classes, boost squads and become really overpowered without even noticing it and just having a grand old time.

Then I reached the end of the story and the post-game, and 2 things became apparent:
1. Everything that I'd done so far was completely useless;
2. There was only one "right" way to go from there.

Once you reach the post game, there are a couple of scenarios that you unlock that can be completed at or around end-game levels or with minimal grinding, but at a certain point, you reach the loving WALL of the Carnage Dimension. To even unlock the loving thing, you need to min/max a character, which means that you have to follow a very specific path unless you want to waste ten times as much time doing loving chores before your character is even viable to bring into the second half of the post-game.

I have only played the original Disgaea before, but I think I remember that after spending some time bringing your first character to an insane level by going through the same map (Cave of Ordeals 3, I think?) about a million times, you could start dicking around again and you'd still make progress, and if you wanted to bring other characters up to speed for some variety, you could give them some insane weapons that your main character leveled up and they would catch up in no time.

In Disgaea 5, the first thing to do when approaching the late post-game is to master EVERY sub-class with a character for a boost to their base stats, then reincarnation (starting over from level 1) then back to level 9999 for the stat growth. This is done on a single map, repeated dozens of times, and takes for loving ever unless you have a very specific skill unique to a specific class, which makes it only take most of forever.

Once you've done that, you have a tiny bit more freedom on the next steps, but I feel like it's much more advantageous to go for shards and extracts (which directly raise stats) by grinding in a single stage with, again, a specific skill unique to the same class as before. Once you've done that for another forever, you're ready to go hunt for weapons, then level these weapons and put some innocents on them.

And even after your first character has gone through all of this, it doesn't help much with bringing other characters up to speed because they still have to master all of the sub-classes.

I mean, I know that Disgaea is all about the grind, but progression was so organic while I was still going through the story and it came to a dead stop once I reached the post game, I think I got whiplash. And the fact that literally everything that you do before that very specific min/maxing regimen is literally useless. Even worse because I feel like Disgaea 1 got this part so much better.

Maybe it's just nostalgia...

*What do you mean 100 hours played!? How is that even possible?

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...

Biplane posted:

My new favorite thing dragging down a game is how Dishonored: Definitive Edition doesn't let you turn off the speaker on the PS4 controller, and it's used sooo loving much holy poo poo

I'm not home right now to check, but I'm pretty sure there's a setting on the PS4 itself to have all audio come out of your sound system and basically turn off the controller's speaker.

Edit: Beaten, of course...

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...
Enemies in Darksiders can almost never be interrupted by your attacks, so fights always consist of doing as much of your favourite combo as you can and dodging out of the way as soon as you see an enemy winding up. It also makes the counter move way less useful and harder to use than it should be, because perfectly blocking the first hit in a combo means you'll get hit by the second hit before you can counter.

It also has the closest I've ever seen to a perfectly reversed difficulty curve. Health is the main thing, almost the only thing, that makes the game easier, and it has way fewer "heart pieces" to be found in the wild than Zelda does, so you basically just get tankier and tankier as you kill bosses, which makes them easier and easier as the game progresses, and nothing really ever makes up for it. The end result is that the first boss can kill you in 3 hits, but you're basically invincible when you face the final boss.

Edit: Having played the game before, I also know that toward the end, you get a sword that is already at max level and replaces your original (better looking) sword, making your earlier sword level pointless.

CordlessPen has a new favorite as of 01:22 on Jun 2, 2017

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...

Kit Walker posted:

I've never felt like the SMT games were too hard, though. Even crazy cheap bosses usually have a weakness you can exploit to destroy them. I've played the first three main SMT games, DDS, the second Devil Summoner game, and Strange Journey, and the only one that I felt had a really steep difficulty jump in the endgame was Strange Journey where the final boss is just utterly brutal for no reason and it feels like a slugfest. Usually the end tends to be the easiest part because you have access to insanely overpowered abilities and can turn the tables on everyone. Of course, this isn't talking about the optional superbosses who tend to require one very specific strategy lest they one-shot you for doing something else

I had a really hard time with DDS because it was my first SMT game and they do not work like the games I was used to when I was a kid. I was used to Final Fantasy, where status effects / ailments were pretty much always a waste of time because they only worked on common enemies that died in a single hit anyway and all bosses were immune to them, and magical elements were only useful in the sense that one of them worked better than the others on some enemies, but your black mage had all of them anyways.

I limped along for most of the game playing it mostly like a FF game, trying to take advantage of the press turn system but severely ignoring major gameplay mechanics, but I only learned extremely late in the game that I should have been teaching my characters the element opposite to their strength so that they would be able to counter their weakness and vary their skillset a bit. Instead, I made my ice guy a super powerful but super specialized ice guy, my wind dude a specialized wind dude, etc., so when the last boss required me to use all the elements with just my 3 characters, I was pretty much hosed. In the end, I again limped along and barely beat it by using elemental items that I had been hoarding all game because Final Fantasy.

So yeah, the first one you try will propably seem harder than it actually is if you're used to FF games.

Edit: Oviously I never even touched optional bosses, because gently caress Cielo.

CordlessPen has a new favorite as of 18:18 on Aug 8, 2017

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...
I apparently really love Persona 5, because I put in like 40 hours in 2-3 weeks, but there are so many little things that I find annoying that sometimes I wonder why.

Like, why can't I do more things on an off day than on a school day? It's even worse because there are a few, very rare places where they acknowledge that you should have more free time (you can make more tools on a Sunday, for example), but other than those, apparently those 7 hours I spent at school or in transit have no impact on how productive my day can be.

There's not enough variation in the different types of encounter. There are more than enough enemy types, so it's not an esthetic problem, but within a dungeon, there are always about a dozen different enemy configurations, and dungeons last for hours, so after a while you've encountered evey possible configuration and have found the optimal way to defeat the enemies without them getting a turn, so you just repeat that process over and over until the boss. It's even worse because some of them can be identified by their level before you even trigger the fight ("Oh, this dog's got a red outline, gotta be the monkey with the greek goddess, time to Psion twice then all-out attack").

There's an option to auto-progress conversations. This works really well with voiced lines because the dialogue plays at a normal pace, but lines that aren't voiced stay for way too long, so you have to make them progress manually anyway. Some lines also absolutely require your input for no apparent reason. Then there's also the fact that even when the dialogue does auto-play, the game keeps asking for your input to answer some question where your answer has literally no impact on anything (your options are very often along the lines of "Yes", "Yeah", "Yep" and "...").

There's very little logic behind what your confidants will love as a gift, so I ended up following a guide so I wouldn't waste thousands of yen and, more importantly, time because I have to guess who would like a fountain pen.

I think the class quizzes should have been localized better instead of just translated. I would gladly answer some trivia questions honestly, even if it meant getting some of them wrong and not min-maxing my intelligence points, if they were more of a general knowledge thing, because it would be fun, but they're almost all EXTREMELY japanese (questions on kanji and japanese provinces...) and, as far as I'm concerned, impossible for an average North American, so gently caress those, I'm using a guide.

A good part of the game is spent in a randomly generated dungeon where you lose what I would consider a pretty important gameplay mechanic, stealth, because you're driving around in a car instead of walking.

Most of the time, if you're sprinting with R2, your character will automatically jump gaps, but some gaps can't be jumped like that for some (no) reason.

Morgana is named "Morgana" and nicknamed "Mona" and is voiced by a woman, but everybody assumes (correctly) that he's a man/male.

I still really like the game, but I feel like it's slowly grinding down my enthusiasm...

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...

BioEnchanted posted:

I hate when decent games are spoiled because the main characters have moments when they are generally gross in a way that may not have been intended, like Ergo in Anima Gate of Memories.
Aren't you raped by the leader of the good guys in Farcry 3? A lot of people talk about how it's in poor taste that your friend gets raped by one of the bad guy's lieutenant, but I almost never hear about the time when you get drugged and wake up with your quest-giver on top of you, naked.

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...

ShootaBoy posted:

Seriously though, how the gently caress did that thing get a sequel???

I too am baffled, because on top of being a brawler (ostensibly) where you can only ever take 2-3 hits before dying, the balance is completely out of whack (seriously, I'd rather play as almost any enemy rather than Knack, because they have more health and better attacks with more range), the camera system is straight out of the PS1, the controls are pretty bad (right stick for dodging?) and the game looks eerily like an iOS game. Seriously. The cinematics look like an ad for Clash of Clans.

The only reason the game is playable at all is that you have unlimited lives and you get to keep your super meter while the yellow crystals respawn, so eventually, after dying a dozen times, you can super-attack your way out of everything until the next checkpoint.

The chests with random loot where you can choose between your own loot or whatever one of your friends found in the same chest is kinda neat, but nobody on my friends list has played or will ever play Knack, so it's pretty useless to me.

CordlessPen has a new favorite as of 21:07 on Feb 17, 2018

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...

Oxxidation posted:

Sen's Fortress is a heart-in-mouth experience the whole way through and I really think making its bonfire so well-concealed was excessively cruel.

True, but in addition to the bonfire, isn't there also a really cool shortcut behind the breakable wall?

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...
I love DMC4 more than I love life, and I love DMC4:SE even more than that, but some design decisions are just so lazy, it's almost impressive.

I'll always defend the re-use of the same maps when playing as Nero and then Dante, not because it's not bad practice, but because I'd rather have 5 characters that play very differently from each other than having a longer or more varied experience the first time through, and I understand that time is a finite ressource. They also made some effort to differentiate between the Nero and Dante playthrough (with varying levels of success), and I'm going to play the game a dozen times anyway, so replaying maps isn't a concern.

But what strikes me as even lazier than that is that the maps aren't just re-used; they're copy-pasted with the minimal amount of change to make you run through them on a different path, which is really obvious when you look at item placement. When Nero gets a green orb before a boss (to make sure you start the fight with a modicum of health), Dante will find the same one at the same place, but for him it'll be at the very start of a mission, after starting at full health, so completely useless. Red orbs caches are also hidden in the same spots, so instead of an easy opportunity for a quick hide-and-seek, it becomes an annoying detour for your S rank (well, it always becomes that, but it's even faster because they share the same caches).

A similar thing happens in the Bloody Palace; every level right after a boss is a super easy floor with enemies that drop green orbs, like nothing but Chimera, an enemiy that dies in one move and always drops health, which would be a cool way to bring you back to full health after a tough fight, but all the bosses drop a full health orb when they die, so you're always at full health when starting those floors.

Might seem kinda weird that I'm not bothered by the game actually being half a game that was mirrored to make long enough and I'm angry at useless but ultimately harmless orbs that aren't as well placed as I'd like them to be, but I feel like this shows that the balance wasn't as well thought out as in the other games.

I'll still play this loving game until I die.

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...

Leavemywife posted:

Bio, do play the second DMC at some point. I've heard nothing but awful things about it, and you always seem to find the peanuts in a pile of poo poo.

This is definitely material for the sister thread, but DMC2 actually has a few cool things. It's the first game with twosome time, rain storm and a few moves that would later become the Trickster style. It has a dedicated dodge button, quick weapon switching and extra characters that weren't just costumes. And while it was really loving bad, it has the first instance of the bloody palace.

DMC2 is a bunch of cool ideas badly implemented onto a garbage gameplay core.

Edit: While we're here, it has a very short air combo which I absolutely loved and I believe led into the aerial combo of DMC3's Swordmaster style, and it has, in my opinion, the biggest jump in quality in regards to the camera. It gets better with every game, but the jump from 1 to 2 is, if I remember right, a pretty big one.

Edit 2: Oh wait, I just remembered the part in the sewers where you have to stab walls for a while. The camera sucked. Never mind.

CordlessPen has a new favorite as of 02:01 on Mar 21, 2018

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...

Convex posted:

I loved DS1 mainly because I checked a wiki anytime I lost patience with it. Otherwise I probably would have given up after a couple of hours and missed out on a great experience
When I read about how Dark Souls teaches and guides its players, I usually agree, even if it didn't always work on me (2 dum 4 Dark Souls), but nobody will ever convince me that the weapon upgrade tree was a good idea. Like, 5 different upgrade paths that use super rare materials and are vital to progressing through the endgame, some (all?) of which are hidden and split among a few different smiths, and the game does a piss poor job of telling you what does what.

Once you know about it, it's much simpler than it looks, but I remember my first playthrough thinking that making a weapon "Divine" would be great, because I just found the ember and basically ruining a +5 (or +10?) weapon.

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...

Leavemywife posted:

One thing that is driving me crazy, though, is how any of the guns don't seem to really have much oomph behind them. I'm currently using the grenade launcher, since it does the most damage, but it feels really anemic all the same.
Sorry, this is a pretty old quote, but I love DMC so loving much...

The guns in DMC1 aren't really used for damage, but rather each is used for a more or less specific purpose. Ebony and Ivory are used to juggle enemies and keep combos going, the shotgun is used to slow down and interrupt enemies, the grenade laucher is more for crowd control and building up DT, and Nightmare Beta deals good damge, but only when using DT. I feel like the design of DMC1 doesn't consider guns as primary "moves" (outside of weak points like the Sin masks and the Shadows' topside, and charged shots), but rather tools that complement the melee combat systems.

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...

BiggerBoat posted:

That's the one I was thinking of then. It's been a while but I remember one SH game blatantly ripping off Jacob's Ladder. The subway scene definitely stood out. Think they did a hospital gurny scene too.

EDIT: No, wait, SH4 was the room and not the one I was thinking of . Maybe I'm getting them mixed up. that, or they all stole from that movie.

SH3 has a (iirc very short) subway section (beneath the mall? that ends with the worm fight? I can't remember...), maybe that's what you're thinking about.

Although I'd say all the Silent Hill games crib really heavily from Jacob's Ladder, especially 2 onward.

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...

PubicMice posted:

Then why does no one give a poo poo about androids? You see the massive disconnect, right?

I haven't played Detroit (though the more I hear about it, the more curious I get, despite loathing Beyond and Heavy Rain), but I think it's plausible. Some people get weirdly attached to their Sony robot dogs, but as a society nobody would look twice at a pile of them in a dump.

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...

spit on my clit posted:

you forgot how he ordered the 3d modelers to make a nude ellen page for beyond: two souls

Each time I hear about this Cage gets worse.

The version I choose to believe is that the "base" model is anatomically correct and they didn't bother removing the naughy bits when they made it Ellen Page.

Edit: Beaten.

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...
I'm playing Destiny 2 and, to be honest, I enjoy it a lot more than I thought I would and am starting to consider buying the FULL-GAME-PRICED expension coming out soon, but man are there some questionable mechanics in there...

For exemple, there are 2 possible ways to go back to the game after dying. Most of the time, you respawn, MMO-style, which means that everything in the game world keeps going, you just reappear a little further back and keep playing. The game is usually balanced in that shielded enemies get their shield back by the time you get to where you were again, so timed objectives are harder to achieve, and it kinda works even if it makes things a bit too easy sometimes, in a "throw bodies at the problem" kind of way. Other times though, in certain specific areas or during certain missions or events, you go back to a checkpoint instead. By itself, it's not a problem. I actually like that, because respawning in a mission makes it seem like you're eventually going to win no matter what and takes away from your victory a little bit. But the way it's handled is loving atrocious.

For starters, you go back to a checkpoint, but a lot of things actually remain the same, for good or ill, like your ammo count and your ability timers. Sometimes it can be fun; if you're having trouble with a certain section, after dying a few times, you'll get all of your abilities back. On the other hand, if you spend all of your ammo because you keep dying to a boss that doesn't spawn any, you'll go back to the same checkpoint with smaller and smaller amounts of ammo until you run dry.

There are also harder versions of story missions that you can do for loot, and one of the ways that they use to make the missions harder is that you don't respawn anymore but rather go back to checkpoints. The thing is, the missions clearly weren't designed with checkpoints in mind and they are super far apart from each other and not very well thought out.

I'm actually having a lot of fun with harder missions and I'm realizing that the game can sometimes be more than just a skinner box, but they really went with quantity over quality for some of the content.

CordlessPen has a new favorite as of 15:51 on Aug 9, 2018

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...

Inspector Gesicht posted:

The game is a sexless, bloodless work laced with low-calibre Joss "Cheats-On-Wife" Whedon quips.

Oh, yeah, the Nathan Fillion character is SO loving ANNOYING. The writing is kinda meh overall, but that robot really takes the cake.

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...
I don't like a trend that I think I'm noticing where games, mostly loot-based games, will indicate damage in DPS rather than some kind of attack rating or hit point. I get that they're trying to be helpful and not make it seem like faster weapons are poo poo, but knowing the base damage is so much more useful than having the DPS calculated for you that I really wonder why they bother. Like, a slow but powerful weapon could have the same DPS as a faster one, but the fact that the first attack would kill in one hit makes a world of difference. It's also not clear what formula they use when calculating DPS as it varies in every game.

I think the most annoying place I've seen it is in Dead Cells, because not only is it not helpful for the usual reasons, the weapons show a second, higher number that indicates the damage a weapon does on a critical hit. Thing is, criticals aren't random, they're actually pretty easy to control (a bunch of them is just "every Xth hit is a crit", sometimes it's hits against a wall, timed hits, etc.), so the game tells you the DPS of just regular attacks and the DPS of just critical attacks, but it means squat in actual use because it doesn't take into account how often criticals happen.

It's not the worst thing in the world, but if the game gave me a base number for damage and criticals, I could work the rest after just a bit of use, but because it tells me the DPS of each kind of hit, I have to "undo" that formula and guesstimate how much damage a weapon would actually do considering that every third hit is a guaranteed critical.

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...

Somfin posted:

So as someone who is making a game, would y'all prefer a damage per standard hit number and perhaps a training dummy that can report your actual in-anger DPS?

Sorry if this is a few pages old, but I'd like to keep poo poo-talking displaying DPS in video games.

I feel like showing DPS instead of stats (attack, speed, etc.) could work, but the problem is that even if it's done well (and I don't think I've ever seen it done well), it makes one aspect of the game too simple because instead of having to think about the advantages of a faster but weaker weapon compared to a slower but more powerful one, you're lead into just using the highest number possible. I think it works in MMOs because attacks are pretty much never interrupted and criticals usually work as a random chance, so DPS is an actually useful stat as your character really is dealing a set amount of damage per second. The problem outside of MMOs is that a lot of factors that are ignored in DPS get important, like AoE, interrupted animations, blocked attacks, etc. A weak but quick weapon is super useful against many weak enemies because you can switch targets more easily, whereas a slower, stronger weapon would "waste" its damage on a powerful hit against only one enemy, and the DPS stat doesn't show that.

I think the thing that annoyed me the most in Dead Cells is that the way stats are displayed is all over the place. For starters, main weapons' stats are displayed in DPS, but items, like grenades, in base damage, unless there's a DoT effect, then it's back to DPS. Main weapons show 2 DPS numbers that represent regular and critical hits which is already annoying because I think that "DPS" should include the odds of scoring a crit, but is even more annoying because criticals hit are different between weapons. Some weapons score a critial hit every 3rd/5th/whateverth hit, so some kind of single, universal DPS that factors in crits would be helpful, but other weapons score crits every time you hit an enemy from the back or against a wall, so the 2 separate numbers make sense, but this also means that it's completely useless in comparing 2 different weapons.

The short version of what I'm saying is do whatever makes actual sense and is useful.

I personally LOVE training dummies to compare weapons, but I know they're divisive.

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...

exquisite tea posted:

In a game like Assassin’s Creed that has systems on top of systems yet still aims for mass appeal, complex UI elements are going to be an inevitability. You want the player to have a ton of information available to them so that they stay engaged and never get lost, but at the same time you lose out on that core simplicity of design. I think customizable HUDs are the best compromise you can make between players who want everything spelled out for them in great detail and those who don’t mind getting lost for awhile.

Customizable HUDs are great, but the game has to have a diegetic way to convey the same information, and usually if there's a HUD, there's no alternative. AC1, surprisingly, was pretty good at not needing the HUD and I managed to play my one and only play through without it because you could pretty easily do without the minimap (by looking at the full-sized map once in a while), the weapon wheel (weapons auto-switched contextually and there was a neat little animation that played if you tried to select the weapon that was already selected), the "puppet" controls (because they were useless in the first place) and the health bar (because you never ever died in AC1).

CordlessPen has a new favorite as of 20:35 on Oct 10, 2018

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...

RBA Starblade posted:

The first time I played Dark Souls I somehow blitzed through that whole thing on my first life and beat it with no issues at all and didn't know what the big deal was. I figured it out on my second character. :v:

The first time I played Dark Souls I stopped very shortly after O&S and thought the game was pretty much perfect!

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...

Danaru posted:

Also Dirge in the thieves guild, who some writer thought was so clever he has a repeatable dialogue option to ask him why he's called that.

"Its because I'm the last thing you hear :smuggo:" Dirges are played AFTER someone dies you dumb gently caress

Wow, that would be so easy to fix, like "You won't hear me until you're already dead".

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...
I don't really play class-based shooters, but my outsider's perspective is that there's probably a balance issue if a team should be evenly split between 3 different roles but everybody wants to play the same (fun) one. MMOs also seem to have this problem; the game requires healers but doesn't make it fun to play as one. Either make the game playable with fewer of the less fun classes or make all classes fun to play.

I know that "fun" is subjective, but if 70/80% of the players play DPS classes, obviously it's appealing to more players.

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...

Ugly In The Morning posted:

2 was the best far cry. Fight me.

I loved navigating by looking down at a map while driving and switching out guns as they wore down. The malaria thing was a misstep but it was the game that really delivered on an open world where everything was out to get you with moments of beauty and some real fun exploration added in.

I did play on PC with save anywhere, though. I can’t imagine doing it on console with limited save locations.

Far Cry 2 is the most ambitious and by far the most technologically impressive at the time of release. It does a lot of things that even the more recent Far Cry games don't do (the destructible foliage, the awesome fire, etc.), it's one of the best attempt at a Heart of Darkness theme in a game (in some ways, it's even better at it than Spec Ops: The Line) and it's really super immersive. The only thing is that a LOT of the design decisions are clearly trying to make the PC miserable and make the player miserable by extension. I can appreciate that to an extent, but eventually I get annoyed and launch a game where I can shoot people without my gun blowing up after 12 shots and not pass out from malaria.

Far Cry 3 is obviously the basis for all the other (streamlined) Far Cry games. It keeps the basic structure, but it's much easier and much more akin to other open world/Ubisoft games. I think it does a lot to make the Far Cry 2 format much more digestible for the average player and it has the best villain of the series (that it kills 2/3 of the way through, wtf?!), but it has a super pretentious story/theme and the streamlining did take a lot out of the uniqueness of the game.

Far Cry 4 is Far Cry 3 with a wing suit and a villain that very obviously tries to be Vaas but doesn't quite make it, but at least doesn't die halfway through the story. The story is just as garbage but at least doesn't pretend to be smart, and while people are super quick to point out that the "good" leaders are a pedophile and a druglord, it's entirely by design.

Far Cry 5 is Far Cry 4 with a few welcome additions to the gameplay (vehicles, map, co-op, etc.), but a completely garbage narrative. It's fun to gently caress around in, but anything related to the story loving blows.

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...
I just started Hollow Knight for PS4 and while I think it's a beautiful and fun game, Jesus H. Christ the map system is so annoying! I totally get what they're going for; in a way I sometimes like the feeling of being lost when I get to a new area, but I disagree with a lot of how they decided to go about it.

I think the most obnoxious thing is that there is no (in game) way to map your progress before you buy a map that can only be found in the area in question, but that the map that you purchase is incomplete and you then have to fill it in yourself. I would have much prefered to be able to map the area myself prior to buying the map and then having the option to purchase a version of it that might have info on rooms I haven't found yet.

It's also a little irritating how you have to equip a trinket that uses one of your EXTREMELY valuable slots if you want to know where you are on the map. Again, I see where they're going eith this, but the frustrating part is that figuring out where you are on the map really isn't difficult, so it's hard to justify wasting the charm slot, but it takes several seconds ("okay, I started from that bench and went left, then down..."), so it becomes annoying pretty fast.

Smaller annoyance: the fact that the map doesn't reflect the paths that you can take, but just the general shape of the room and its exits, which makes it "videogame-y", like if there's a path winding up and down and expands into a maze with multiple dead ends and exits, it'll just show up as one big rectangle because for the game it's just one "room".

It's still an amazing game, it just feels like they tried to fix something that wasn't broken by remaking the standard Metroid-style map.

Edit to add: I'm also not a fan of how you lose a third of your soul when you die and the only way to get it back is to get to your corpse, because I played a bit this morning and died a few times to the same boss and decided to go do something else, but unless I go all the way back to the boss room, I'll never get that soul back. It's not a big deal, since I'm guessing that if I kill myself and run THAT corpse it'll be fine, but it seems odd.

CordlessPen has a new favorite as of 20:44 on Nov 21, 2018

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...

Whatev posted:

Your shade should generally be recoverable without engaging the boss that killed you, but perhaps there are exceptions that I never encountered. In any case, get a simple key and open the chamber on the far right of Dirtmouth past the graveyard. Then you'll be able to trade something with no other purpose for your shade to be recovered.
You're right, it is (or at least it's always been so far), but when i wrote that I was getting stomped by Mawlek, which was (still is!) at the end of a path where I have nothing left to do, so if I wanted to do something else I had to go down to the bottom of the Crossroad then climb back up and then go somewhere else, which I didn't do. It really wasn't that big a deal since I got the soul back after dying to the miners in Crystal Peak and getting that shade back, it just seems a bit weird that you'd lose something so... intrinsic every time you die and that it's so difficult but at the same time easy to get back that it feels a bit useless.

I hope my post doesn't discourage anyone from playing Hollow Knight because it's an amazing game (and a freakin' bargain!), but those 2 things just feel... off.

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...

OutOfPrint posted:

Here's one that popped into my head in the car this morning.

Parasite Eve: Aya's running animation has her taking large, quick steps that don't sync to her run speed. This bothered me the first time I played it for me to shelf the game for a while, which is a shame, since it's otherwise a great game.

This rarely pops up in other games, too, but PE was the most egregious example of it.

Yeah, it's like they took a full sprint animation and slowed it down to jogging speed so in between steps it feels like Aya isn't touching the ground and just slowly hovering. I do think it shows up in other "tank control" games though, I think I recall Fear Effect (or whatever the cel-shaded super-soft-core porn game was called) having a similar problem.

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...

RareAcumen posted:

Do they really not have costumes for them? Considering the type of game it is I would've thought they'd have all kinds of cosmetics for everyone ranging from I dunno, fisherman to astronaut.

I heard that each class has 2 outfits and that the Wing Diver's alternate is a jumpsuit with an old-timey jetpack, so in my head they look like they just walked out of the Moonraker set. Haven't seen it though, and I really shouldn't look for it because then I'll have to buy the game...

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...

Olaf The Stout posted:

Yeah well if it's 1995 and you only get one game rental a month from your parents and you don't have internet for cheats Do Not get loving comix zone lmao

Man, I loved that game so much when I was a kid, but yeah, it's hard as balls, probably to hide the fact that the game would otherwise last about an hour and a half.

Art is expensive!

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...

NonzeroCircle posted:

Being unable to reset my progress in Steep.
The ubisoft site says you can do it in options, except you er, can't.
Tried deleting saves and disabling the cloud but it seems all my stuff is held on the Steep servers so I cant start fresh

The Crew (1) does the same thing and it's preventing me from getting back into it. I have no idea why, but I also have no idea why they wouldn't let you start from scratch.

Morpheus posted:

Oh also the 'antics' of the characters, especially the clubhouse filled with 'wacky' art memes really doesn't gel well with the sorts of things they're doing and what they're up against. Feels really out of place to be all 'lol we're hacking multi-billion dollar companies to stop destructive monopolies here's a meme, kids!' And then you film your character killing some guys and send it out for 'likes' or whatever they do.
In the first few hours, things kind of fit because you're doing annoying 4chan hacktivist things and you mostly have access to non-lethal tools, and by the end, for spoilery reasons, you're a bit more justified if you decide to go on multiple killing sprees, but the HUGE middle chunk feels REALLY awkward if, like me, you decided to rock a grenade launcher and an AR15 while you try to get someone fired from Google for being mean to your friend (I may be downplaying how evil the Google guy was, I don't remember much from the plot).

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...

Strom Cuzewon posted:

Also the gimmick is dumb! Having to speak in an arbitrarily silly way is for drinking games, not quizzes!

I've always wanted to ask if, in the olden days, they actually respected their gimmick or used it in clever ways because I've only watched Jeopardy in the late 90s and early 00s and it always seemed to me that they just ask regular old questions but with a slight grammar quirk.

Was there any point where they actually "asked" an answer and people had to guess an actual question, or has it always been "James Joyce, final answer" "I'm sorry, the answer was 'Who was James Joyce', you are the weakest link, goodbye"?

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...

Cleretic posted:

Warframe doesn't have any way to reset your account, or replay previous missions. Which is real bad when you're like I am, and played a little bit months ago and only now picked it back up, because I don't remember how to play, my chosen Warframe's powers, or what was going on.

I figured out I can murder people with telekinesis, though, so that's helping.

Last year, I tried to get back into The Crew after not playing it for a year or two and I realized that you absolutely cannot erase your save filed that's kept on the uCloud so you can't start over. I'm not sure why it's even a real problem because that game's story is barely a thing and you can replay all story missions from a menu, but it still made me uninstall the game right back and wait for The Crew 2 (which... ugh.).

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...
I recently bought the 4k remaster of Resonance of Fate because I remembered liking the combat system back on the 360 and I didn't remember finishing it. For a while, I did like the combat system because it IS unique, but it really didn't take long before the flaws caught up and I started hating it.

1) You only get 3 characters total for the entire game, and (normally) all 3 are on the field in combat. The main mechanic of the combat system, the titular Resonance system, relies on having 3 characters. Almost every other story chapter has a significant portion of it where you can only use 2 or even 1 character.

1b) When you lose your character and they come back, they unequip all of their equipment. I understand that they do this so their equipment is available for the rest of the team while they're gone, but it's especially annoying because you can't re-equip anything while inside a dungeon.

2) Every single thing is the combat system seems designed so that you either win by a landslide or lose horribly, with no in-between. When you start winning, you break "body parts" on enemies which stuns them and gives you a bezel back, which means that you can just keep attacking, which means that you keep breaking parts and stunning enemies until they die. If you don't do enough damage though, enemies heal their damage almost as quick as you can dish it out and hit like a ton of bricks, and when you run out of HP you LOSE bezels, which means that you attack less often and start losing very quickly. Also, when one character runs out of HP, the lost bezels scatter on the ground and enemies that pick them up get healed. If you run out of bezels, you move very slowly and lose the ability I described earlier as the only way to attack, so unless the enemy is also almost dead, you can pretty much never recover from this.

3) I'm already one of those people who hate status effects, but this game manages to really turn that up to 11. The Resonance system I described earlier resets to 0 (basically) if even one of your actions isn't a run and gun, so being frozen and unable to take an action means you lose all your Resonance points. If you get poisoned, you lose actual health (normal attacks do "scratch damage which can be healed more easily, actualy health require super rare items or rest at a save point) and can leave you at a max health of 1hp. Shock and fire aren't too bad, at least.

4) Everything uses the same "ressource", the bezels that I mentioned earlier, which means that the game gets progressively easier as you get more of them because you can both take and deal more damage for every bezel that you have.

5) This is another category, but whenever you the running move I mentionned, if you hit anything, your character stumbles and stops their attack, You don't lose resonance points, thank god, but it happens really often because enemies move while you do and they have insanely huge hitboxes.

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...

Nuebot posted:

Which is where the combat system lost me. Armor is annoying. You see - as you say, it's all about shooting body parts off of dudes. More than halfway through the game everything starts wearing armor. Then its armor has armor. Then the armor's armor has armor. You have to shoot the armor off to shoot the body parts. It sucks and I hate it and it makes every encounter take five times as long.
Armor over armor is kinda cool at first because it's more parts that you can destroy to regain bezels when fighting tough enemies, but yeah, when regular enemies start having that, fights really start to drag on. It's doubly egregious when the armor is visually represented by sunglasses or a hat, like that was the reason the enemy couldn't take any damage, because he had sunglasses.

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...
In Toon Blast, it's annoying that when you mix more than 2 power-ups it automatically mixes the 2 "highest" ones in the hierarchy because bomb+rocket is usually more useful than bomb+bomb and disco ball+rocket than disco ball+bomb. It's also annoying that in some levels you're penalized for having a better starting bonus because there are so few colored squares that all your bonuses get clumped up and yo always end up with a single big bomb. Some levels even start with enough blocks of the same colour for a disco ball but you lose it when some of them get turned to bombs and rockets, penalizing you for having a starting bonus at all.

Get your poo poo together Toon Blast!

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...
I just started playing Days Gone and I'm both plesantly surprised because I really didn't expect anything at first and disappointed because enough people told me it was worth picking up on sale that I started to get a little hyped. I'm a couple of hours in, so maybe this changes as the game progresses, but one of the most annoying things is how the game really manages to make you feel like a scavenger in a post-apocalyptic world (you want to use stealth, you want to save bullets, you want to avoid using gas, you want to srounge for melee weapons), but it does it in the worst loving ways. Yes, the game will make you think twice before using precious bullets, but not because bullets are rare, rather because you can only carry 2 extra magazines. You want to save gas, but not because it's hard to find, because a full tank will carry you about a single mile. There's a LOT of gas and bullets to go around, you just can't carry them with you. Instead of making the world seem hostile it makes your character seem weak.

The zombie apocalypse also made a bunch of ramps just pop out of nowhere...

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...

Digirat posted:

This is a really annoying “so close to getting it right” thing that a lot of games seem to mess up. they know that being able to separate stats from appearance is a good thing but they just go with the first implementation they think of. it’s way worse to make you change the appearance of each piece of armor itself, where your barbie gets messed up the next time you switch any piece of armor, instead of just having a second set of appearance-only override armor slots like terraria.

Yes I have strong opinions about the Right Way to do fake barbie dress up

The worst thing is that, in my opinion, they had it exactly right in the past. I don't remember what game it was, but there was an MMO (I think) where you chose an item to equip and have their stats, and (if you wanted) another item to wear "over" it and have their appearance, and as long as you had that item equipped, you had that look, no matter what change you made underneath.

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...

Len posted:

It can't kill you if it's dead

Debatable when it comes to zombies.

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CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...
I'm really, REALLY digging Control, but one thing dragging it down is that the way the telekinesis power works doesn't allow you to hurl yourself hundreds of feet into the air like in Psi-Ops.

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