Games that are great...except for the game part.

[BrawlMan]

You clearly do give a fuck, because you're here moaning about it and refusing to play the game because you're upset you can't have your cake and eat it. I care not in the least whether you "back down", I'm quite happy just pointing out your beliefs are at best merely subjective and at worst poorly considered.

The player isn't being fucked over: all that cool shit is there for them to use, it just comes with consequences from excessive use. Deal with it. Whether it's "profound" or not isn't the point. It's a mechanic that provides the player with an element of choice for how they want to approach the game. It can be thought of as an internal difficulty setting: you can make your game a lot easier killing what you feel like, but you might not get the end you want - thus it nudges players to explore ways of playing the game they might not otherwise choose. And, finally, it is simply thematically consistent with the narrative and setting of the game.

There are numerous good reasons behind it. The fact you simply don't like it is your problem, but all that really merits is a small

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Once again, I don't care. I am not doing this constant back and forth where nothing is accomplished, but continuously disagreeing. You like it, fine by me. I don't; not a big fucking deal nor the end of the world. Now leave me the same courtesy and do the same. I am moving on to other things now.

In fact, this concept exists in lots of other games, too. In Baldur's Gate 2, you can keep turning yourself into a rampaging, monstrous, death machine and make your combats easier - at the cost that NPCs will increasingly fear and hate you. I played a Cold War strategy game where if you do really well as NATO you can push back the Warsaw Pact far enough through Germany and Poland to invade the USSR... and the game promptly ends in total global thermonuclear war mutual defeat, because that's what would happen.

And it sounds like they all do it better than Dishonored, because of either better planning or takes place in our real world. So congragulation for introducing games that accomplished way more. Thank you.

 

[Hawki]

I played a Cold War strategy game where if you do really well as NATO you can push back the Warsaw Pact far enough through Germany and Poland to invade the USSR... and the game promptly ends in total global thermonuclear war mutual defeat, because that's what would happen.

That sounds like a strange game. It seems the winning move is not to play.

 

[Dalisclock]

Yes. She might be an awful person, but I think even that end for her is a very uncomfortable step. I suspect had Dishonored been made even just five years later, with rapidly changing public attitudes, the devs might have thought up something different.

At it's best, I can see that as an homage to Phantom of the Opera. It's still creepy as fuck though and I remember thinking that even when It came out.

 

[Casual Shinji]

That creature is basically a reference to part Guts's backstory. He came out of his mother's womb as she hanged to death from a tree. His uncle, took care of him at the time, but always secretly hated him. He blamed his sister's death on Guts (even though he was literally a baby that was just born) The uncle tried to kill Guts, but Guts killed him in self defense and ran away.

Well ackchyually, that wasn't his uncle, he was the leader of the mercenary band that happened upon the hanging tree. And the woman, Shisu, wasn't his sister, but simply one of the women traveling along with this troupe who was either there to clean or... you know, "put on the red light", or both. She had apparently lost her baby in childbirth (implied to have been Gambino's), came across lifeless baby Guts, and as she picked him up to care for him, Gambino, the leader, tried to pull her away from the baby, causing Guts to fall to the ground and spring back to life.

Some of the other mercenaries saw Guts being born the way he was and the place where he was born as an ill omen, and to just leave him there. But seeing as he was pretty much close to death anyway Gambino figured he might as well let Shisu have some comfort, and that Guts would probably die quickly on his own. Only that didn't happen, and a few years on Shisu died of the plague, which Gambino then quietly blamed Guts for, the whole idea of him beind cursed having taken root in his head despite him initially just disregarding it as superstition. That along with Gambino having zero parental skills, being a murderous dickhead, but still being forced to take care of a child, caused his resentment to grow even further.

 

[BrawlMan]

Well ackchyually, that wasn't his uncle, he was the leader of the mercenary band that happened upon the hanging tree. And the woman, Shisu, wasn't his sister, but simply one of the women traveling along with this troupe who was either there to clean or... you know, "put on the red light", or both. She had apparently lost her baby in childbirth (implied to have been Gambino's), came across lifeless baby Guts, and as she picked him up to care for him, Gambino, the leader, tried to pull her away from the baby, causing Guts to fall to the ground and spring back to life.

Some of the other mercenaries saw Guts being born the way he was and the place where he was born as an ill omen, and to just leave him there. But seeing as he was pretty much close to death anyway Gambino figured he might as well let Shisu have some comfort, and that Guts would probably die quickly on his own. Only that didn't happen, and a few years on Shisu died of the plague, which Gambino then quietly blamed Guts for, the whole idea of him beind cursed having taken root in his head despite him initially just disregarding it as superstition. That along with Gambino having zero parental skills, being a murderous dickhead, but still being forced to take care of a child, caused his resentment to grow even further.

Thank you for that clear up. I was going to edit that, when I realized my mistake earlier this weekend. I see no need to do so at this point.

 

[BrawlMan]

Tokyo Beat Down - the story is fine and fun for what it is, and you will love all the characters. Where it really excels is in the humor. The game play itself is just a fairly average brawler. You do unlock moves, but how you get them is really tedious. You have to do side mission successfully in order to unlock new moves. And the best way to win, ironically enough is to spam certain grab moves over and over just to kill enemies. Also, the game does get tedious around the last end of the game. There are multiple endings too. A good ending and a bad ending. It depends on how fast you save a certain character in one stage. Once you beaten the game, there's not much reason to go back. The game is only on Nintendo ds. I always planned on getting it but never got around to it. I played the game on a emulator. The Amazon prices for this game are through the roof. No way a game like this is worth 100 plus dollars. I just realized the Nintendo DS only had a few brawlers. Most of them fairly mediocre.

 

[BrawlMan]

Final Fight: StreetWise. Except in this case, it's everything. The soundtrack is great though and there are plenty of good remixes. But what we should have gotten was something better in it's original incarnation during the prototype phase. Capcom got greedy, and was riding on that wave on trying to cash in on GTA fans. It didn't work here and it did not work for their other "dark and gritty" brawler.

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[Fallen Soldier]

I adore Dragon Age origins, but I was never a fan of the auto combat it had.

 

[BrawlMan]

DMC1's rail shooting section near end game. It comes out of nowhere, and the controls are inverted. It gets worse on DMD. DMC3's last few missions have backtracking. While the environments are switched up and arranged, they're not as interesting to go through, or are completely annoying to navigate. Even when you know what to do or where to go. The second half of the DMC4's campaign is not as fun as the first half due to lazy backtracking, and the reuse of too many bosses.

 

[BrawlMan]

Anytime platforming rears its ugly head in the classic NES Double Dragon games.

The story mode in Tekken 7. Once you complete it, you'll never want to do it again. The writing is god-awful and the story has these really boring and unnecessary twists.

 

[Zykon TheLich]

I played a Cold War strategy game where if you do really well as NATO you can push back the Warsaw Pact far enough through Germany and Poland to invade the USSR... and the game promptly ends in total global thermonuclear war mutual defeat, because that's what would happen.

Was that Theatre Europe by any chance?

 

[Old_Hunter_77]

I know the Witcher has been mentioned, but since I've spent so much time with the game series and the TV show and books, it'll always come to mind.

The first two games are my answer to the question. Witcher 2 was my first game in the series and my intro the IP and I was enthralled. That game's characters and art design and world were immediately absorbing. Then when you get that branching story line begging a repeated play-through, I love it!
But I play games with controller almost exclusively and I was doing that with this game and my god what a nightmare. The menus and UI were atrocious (I constantly removed Geralt's boots by accident so much that I just dropped the game level to easy and played half of it barefoot). I hated the combat itself- awkward rolling around and all that.
After playing W3 and reading the books I had to play the first game and I thought it was really cool narratively and some of the areas and quests were so weird and quirky. But that stupid mouse clicky timing thing for combat is... blech.. especially in that swamp area with endlessly respawning drowners, oh god. I gave up and just installed a cheat mod to go through the story.

Witcher 3, however... well, it's perfection to me. I know a lot of gamers complain it's "clunky" or bad or whatever, but I just don't see it. I genuinely love the combat, how it feels, how it looks, messing with the potions and oils and I look forward to every fight. I've replayed this game like a dozen times and eagerly look forward to the promised visual upgrade to do it again and fight every drowner and griffin across the maps.
Many of the complaints come from Soulsborne fans. But I am also a Soulsborne fan! However, I did play W3 before getting into all the Soulsborne stuff so maybe that matters. I mean, yeah, Bloodborne and Sekiro are the greatest combat I've ever experienced, for sure. But I don't like comparing them because to me the combat is the PRIMARY gameplay element, so it has to be hard and precise and engrossing. In W3, the combat should be relatively accessible and, yes, "easy" (comparatively) so that we can complete quests. Frankly, I think it's unfair to compare them just because they're both 3rd person melee combat in a fantasy setting- the two series fulfill two very different gaming needs, at least for me.

 

[RhombusHatesYou]

Was that Theatre Europe by any chance?

Hooohooo... now there's a blast from the past (authorisation: MIDNIGHT SUN). I had that on the C64. Fucking 3rd Guards Tank Army rolling over all my shit for the first few days and camping on my eastern most reforger site.

If memory serves, 'putting so much as a toe into the USSR proper triggering a nuclear war' end game state was a thing in several titles of the same genre and vintage... because every kid in the 80s needed more fuel for nuclear war nightmares.

 

[Zykon TheLich]

Hooohooo... now there's a blast from the past (authorisation: MIDNIGHT SUN). I had that on the C64. Fucking 3rd Guards Tank Army rolling over all my shit for the first few days and camping on my eastern most reforger site.

If memory serves, 'putting so much as a toe into the USSR proper triggering a nuclear war' end game state was a thing in several titles of the same genre and vintage... because every kid in the 80s needed more fuel for nuclear war nightmares.

I could have sworn Fumble Winter was one of the authorisation codes. Might have been a different game, or perhaps the chemical attack authorisation. I only played a couple of games, but pretty sure I usually stopped the pact crossing the Rhine and caused enough damage to them to call it a bloody victory.

I had one of those nuclear attack calculators on the Amiga. Fun times, living in London, realising you'd probably be within a few miles of an exploding nuke or two and having a computer tell you how horribly you would die. Fortunately old Gorby was warming relations by then so it wasn't quite such an all pervading sense of doom.

 

[RhombusHatesYou]

I could have sworn Fumble Winter was one of the authorisation codes. Might have been a different game, or perhaps the chemical attack authorisation. I only played a couple of games, but pretty sure I usually stopped the pact crossing the Rhine and caused enough damage to them to call it a bloody victory.

Fimbulwinter might have been the Soviet nuke code when you played as them pesky commies.

I had one of those nuclear attack calculators on the Amiga. Fun times, living in London, realising you'd probably be within a few miles of an exploding nuke or two and having a computer tell you how horribly you would die. Fortunately old Gorby was warming relations by then so it wasn't quite such an all pervading sense of doom.

They still exist online, too. The good ones will show the blast, radiation/flash and fallout zones for everything from a suitcase nuke to the Tsar Bomba (both tested version and 'Holy Crapcakes!' theoretical version).

 

[Gergar12]

I don't know if it was mentioned, but Overwatch, the lore, and backstories are amazing, the game right now is dealing with major problems with balance and boredom.

 

[Inazuma1]

The story mode in Tekken 7. Once you complete it, you'll never want to do it again. The writing is god-awful story has these really boring and unnecessary twists.

The story to Tekken 7 is absolute ass and renders the plot of 6 completely pointless because of all the asspull retcons it makes. The narrator in particular became a meme damn near overnight because of his thorazine induced deadpan delivery even though he has a personal stake in everything after his hometown and family get torched early on. Maybe this is a thing in Japanese storytelling where the narrator has to remain as detached as possible and let the visuals carry the intensity of the scene but it does not translate well in the West at all. Then after theres the bonus Shin Akuma fight which is an exercise in torture. SAkuma blatantly cheats since he can FC almost any move he makes and infinitely regains meter after he uses it. I've seen vids of pro Korean players like JDCR trying to take him on and getting tilted because of how his bullshit spits in the face of their perfect play frame data centric sensibilities.

 

[BrawlMan]

The prison level in Dead to Rights. Chapter III goes on for way too long in a game that is a Max Payne clone. I get trying to be different from the competition, but Namco was trying way too hard and were doing obvious padding with tedious difficulty. There is always some time of mini game or a rail shooting section that never comes back. The XBOX version is the worst with this. The PC, PS2, and GC versions actually cut down the prison level by a lot, but still feels padded in some cases. Once I beat the game, I rarely ever bothered the stage again. Thank God you can stage select or use a unlock all chapters cheat code.

The melee combat is not all that good either. Not the worst, but once you know how the AI works, you can dupe them or do certain exploits over and over again. Thankfully, the game goes back to the shooting for most of the game. The later ports are all easier than the XBOX version, even on hard mode, so that is a good benefit.

 

[BrawlMan]

All the forced walking sections, and the live-action episodes of Quantum Break.

 

[Xprimentyl]

If you want to play something that might have been closer to the vision they had for Dark Sector then you should check out Warframe, the Excalibur frame was even in Dark Sector at some point.

So I downloaded Warframe yesterday. Not digging how it just kinda thrust me into the action, i.e.: no tutorial or anything, just a bunch of shiny textures everywhere and menus within menus. There's just a bunch of shit going on everywhere on screen, not the lest of which is a "chat room" at the bottom left of my screen; what the hell is that?? Along with feeling like I showed up several hours late to the party, I'm getting strong Destiny vibes. Is this just Destiny? It's Destiny, isn't it? I don't want to play Destiny again.