Parts you hate in games you love

[Rocky]

Playing through Sniper Elite 3 atm. Beautiful game. There's just sooooo much waiting around. I understand you're a sniper and they'll wait as long as necessary but I'm not sure it's really required in a game.

[Schlitzbrille]

On 9/7/2017 at 09:40, Chuck Tingle said:

Final Fantasy X, Calm Lands chocobo race. Getting a sub-zero second time is a crapshoot, and is required for two parts of Tidus's Celestial Weapon.

Update: Why is it a crapshoot? Requires precision movements to keep your chocobo running smoothly and the birds that fly at you have idiotic hitboxes that trigger at weird times, often behind you. On occasion, clear hits won't register and vice versa.

[apsham]

4 hours ago, Bobfoc said:

Life Is Strange (original, not the new ones):

  Hide contents

That stealth part in the final episode was balls. The story was already crumbling underneath the time travel mechanics that the game was now just making up as it went along, but crowbarring in a sneaking section with a control system that clearly wasn't designed for it really wasn't a good idea.

 

Episode 4 and 5 started to show where the strain in the budget was. It was a slog to get through.

[=BK=]

There's a PS1 Megaman game where to get to the final portion you get strapped onto a rocket board and have to run an obstacle course as it rockets you forward with no pausing. I've never hated part of a game more. To this very day I can't beat it so I've never been able to play the end of the game.

[Benji]

On 09/09/2017 at 19:41, =BK= said:

There's a PS1 Megaman game where to get to the final portion you get strapped onto a rocket board and have to run an obstacle course as it rockets you forward with no pausing. I've never hated part of a game more. To this very day I can't beat it so I've never been able to play the end of the game.

Those kind of levels are dog crap. It's one of the reasons I can't be arsed with Super Mario Run.

[Skummy]

On a similar note, minecart levels on the Donkey Kong Country game for Wii can fuck right off. Relying on impossibly precise timing is one thing, but impossibly precise timing and leaps of faith and obstacles you couldn't possibly know about until you hit them and die, meaning you're forced to expend countless lives just learning the level and figuring it out. Rarely rage-quitted more, and ruined an otherwise well constructed platformer.

On a broader sense, it betrays a golden rule of level design - a good level should present you with a series of problems, all of which you have the capacity to look at and figure out a solution to. Mario games are invariably brilliant at this. They should not fling you headlong into a problem without giving you the time to figure it out - the only games I can think of that ever made that work are 2D Sonic games, where the level was designed around flinging you uncontrollably into things, though even they always knew when to slow down and take a more conventional/traditional approach. Minecart levels - and to a lesser extent, slippy-slidey ice levels, do the exact opposite, and they're the fucking worst. The way I see it, a good game is one you enjoy even when you're bad at it - and the way to get that experience is to know that every time you're dying, it's your own fault, and you can identify what you're doing wrong; whereas I'll only get angry if it feels like it's the game's fault that I'm dying, through poor level design, bad camera, or wonky controls. Give me any of the latter and I'll be throwing my controller against the wall in minutes.

[Gazz]

I also remember from my youth playing 'Alex Kidd in Miracle World'. You'd get through the level to the boss fight at the end, except it wasn't a 'fight', it was a game of best of three Rock, Paper, Scissors and if you lost, you died and had to start the level again.

[Skummy]

13 minutes ago, Gazz said:

I also remember from my youth playing 'Alex Kidd in Miracle World'. You'd get through the level to the boss fight at the end, except it wasn't a 'fight', it was a game of best of three Rock, Paper, Scissors and if you lost, you died and had to start the level again.

That's why you bought the magic thing from the shopkeeper that let you read their mind and predict what their next move would be! But, yes, that's actually a pretty good example of the sort of thing I'm talking about.

Though I don't think you had to start the level over - pretty sure that when you died in that game you respawned at the same point or, if it was in the game of Janken at the end of the level, you just started that game over. For some reason, while in the rest of game dying saw you turn into an angel, losing in Janken saw you turned to stone and then die and become an angel.

Eventually, you fight Stone Head for a second time and, when you defeat him in Janken, he throws his head off at you. That came as a shock the first time around.

 

As an aside, my absolute favourite thing about Alex Kidd in Miracle World is that, about three or four levels in, you meet an old man who tells you that you're a Prince who's trying to rescue his brother, or whatever the actual plot is. And it's like, wait...what was I doing before you told me that? Just running around punching eagles for no reason?

[Benji]

38 minutes ago, Skummy said:

On a broader sense, it betrays a golden rule of level design - a good level should present you with a series of problems, all of which you have the capacity to look at and figure out a solution to

Oh God yeah, that reminds me of a puzzle in Fez the other week where it you had to not only know programming to figure out a puzzle, but also translate it into the native game language, and only THEN could you do the absursdly complicated dimension switching puzzle. Like, yeah, it's do-able, but it's also absurd and nobody should ever actively put that amount of mental exertion into completing a video game

[9 to 5]

Swimming in various games.

[Benji]

No love for climbing sections either

[9 to 5]

Climbing is alright, a whole game of it, less so.

[Benji]

2 minutes ago, 9 to 5 said:

Climbing is alright, a whole game of it, less so.

Considering how bad you are at it, that does not surprise me

No excuses, it's not like you have deformed limbs.

[Skummy]

1 hour ago, Benji said:

Oh God yeah, that reminds me of a puzzle in Fez the other week where it you had to not only know programming to figure out a puzzle, but also translate it into the native game language, and only THEN could you do the absursdly complicated dimension switching puzzle. Like, yeah, it's do-able, but it's also absurd and nobody should ever actively put that amount of mental exertion into completing a video game

That is insane. I'm not familiar with the game, so I'd assume it's the sort of thing you'd be lead to expect to do?

A good game puzzle should be like a cryptic crossword - even if it's utterly incomprehensible at first, it should all make perfect sense on completion, and all the tools should be there for you from the outset.

That said, the greatest puzzle in any video game ever, which completely ignores that rule, is in the video game adaptation of Labyrinth, which was one of the first Lucasfilm Games point-and-click types. To escape a prison you had to "adumbrate the elephant" - because the game was written by Douglas Adams and he really liked the word. "Adumbrate" means something like to vaguely foreshadow; so adumbrating an elephant would make one appear and break you out of the prison. So preposterous as to actually be genius.

 

[Gazz]

Another one, the goat in Broken Sword.

[Benji]

12 minutes ago, Skummy said:

That is insane. I'm not familiar with the game, so I'd assume it's the sort of thing you'd be lead to expect to do?

Some of the later ones, yeah, but it's never explicitly stated unless you know to translate the languages in the first place, which obviously most people won't do. So glad I used a guide, cause it's a very fun game mechanics-wise, but that kind of stuff is just dumb.

I'll stick with Super Paper Mario for that kind of stuff in future

[lanky316]

19 hours ago, 9 to 5 said:

Climbing is alright, a whole game of it, less so.

Though in Catherine at least you have the "it's my own fault" when brown stuff hits the rotating thing. Until they throw the random "it could be anything" blocks at you... 

[OctoberRaven]

8 hours ago, lanky316 said:

Though in Catherine at least you have the "it's my own fault" when brown stuff hits the rotating thing. Until they throw the random "it could be anything" blocks at you... 

The worst part of Catherine is the escort mission. The random blocks are child's play compared to that.

Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth- No run button in a game that requires platforming. And I get why they do it, but not being able to use your bare hands to defend yourself is the weakest of sauces. I'm a gritty hardboiled detective and I don't know how to throw a punch? I'm not saying he should be able to literally punch out Cthulhu, I am saying he could sucker punch a cultist to buy him time.

[Red Devil-Taker316]

Labyrinth Zone in Sonic 1, Sky Chase Zone in Sonic 2

[KiddKorupt11]

Acts 2 and 3 in Diablo 2. Areas with tight quarters so your merc can't help you and areas that are 3 times longer than they should be. Who doesn't love that shit?