Tiny, insignificant details in games that really bother you

[NerfedFalcon]

Cuphead is an all-time classic, it looks great and it plays great, but I just can't stand how the 'boss defeated' animations never actually end. They just play one animation of the boss coughing and choking on a loop without properly going into a pose that's fully "defeated", and then fades to black. It'd be like if, in Donkey Kong, at the end of the 100m stage, DK just beat his chest over the pit without actually falling down and cracking his skull, then the game suddenly went back to 25m. Where's the climax, the catharsis?

 

[Drathnoxis]

Cuphead is an all-time classic, it looks great and it plays great, but I just can't stand how the 'boss defeated' animations never actually end. They just play one animation of the boss coughing and choking on a loop without properly going into a pose that's fully "defeated", and then fades to black. It'd be like if, in Donkey Kong, at the end of the 100m stage, DK just beat his chest over the pit without actually falling down and cracking his skull, then the game suddenly went back to 25m. Where's the climax, the catharsis?

Uh, doesn't the game suddenly go back to 25m anyway?

 

[NerfedFalcon]

Uh, doesn't the game suddenly go back to 25m anyway?

After DK falls into the pit you created, cracks his skull, and Mario and Pauline share a love heart. The boss fight actually ends, rather than threatening to end and then not ending. And I don't mean 'ends' as in 'you defeated the boss', I mean it comes to a narratively satisfying conclusion, which -IMO- no boss in Cuphead does.

(Side note: If you want to see Donkey Kong not just go back to 25m, play the Game Boy version.)

 

[BrawlMan]

Final Fight (SNES)/FFi Guy only allows three enemies on screen. This is a problem with most SNES brawlers in general, but it started the trend due to CPU limitations on the SNES. To make up for it, enemies get more health and do more damage than their arcade counterparts at times. Especially when playing on the hardest modes. The Industrial Area is missing, and the game is too difficult on the vanilla release. I recommend you play the modded versions on emulator with the arcade color hack. Makes the game surprisingly fun with some minor adjustments. Losing all your lives makes you start the stage all over again. Why? What sucks even more is this "feature" is kept in the GBA version. You can at least level select when you unlock it early enough. The American/EU versions of these games suffer from censorship too. Play the Japanese Roms or Rom Hack versions.

 

[BrawlMan]

Not really bothered, but more of something I found odd in GG Gore. Whenever playing as Bunji or when you unlock him, the camera will constantly be over the shoulder, unless he's dodging or barrage shooting. When doing either of these two actions the camera actually zooms out to a more traditional 3rd person camera view.

Now what does still bother me about the game is the ranking system as there is no way to get proper S-Ranks without spamming demolition shots or certain upgrades moves. The stats upgrades should've been dropped and upgrades are too expensive. Bunji cost 30,000 pts when he should have been unlockable for free after beating the game. And you have to upgrade him separately too. The two final levels drag and there is not enviormental destruction to add to your Beat/Combo Counter. Other than, I like the game and glad it got updated properly and removed all the bad platforming. Rose Quartz's stage still sucks, because her combat mechanics are complete ass.

 

[laggyteabag]

Halo 4 takes place four years after the end of Halo 3, and during this time period, a lot of wartime weapons and vehicles have been replaced with newer models. This is why Halo 4 looks so different to Halo 3. The issue is that for most of Halo 4's story, you are stranded on an alien planet by yourself, having crash landed on a ship that has been drifting in space for four years. The problem then, is that basically all of the weapons and vehicles that you come across, are the post-war variants, rather than the wartime stuff that should have been on the ship you crashed on. From a gameplay perspective, this is negligable: The Battle Riffle is still the Battle Rifle, it just looks rather different. Its just anachronistic, and it bothers me slightly every time I play the game.

In contrast, I just finished playing Gears of War 4 and i'm playing Gears 5 at the moment. The new enemy faction originates from wartime burial grounds from 25 years prior, and have since been untouched. Similarly to Halo 4, a lot of new models of existing weapons and equipment have been introduced, so it would have been super weird for the new enemies to appear with brand-new equipment, but lo and behold, the developers modeled in older Lancers and older grenades, just to show that they are using older equipment. Both the old and new stuff function identically to each other, and ammo is interchangeable, it is just a nice little detail.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

Halo 4 takes place four years after the end of Halo 3, and during this time period, a lot of wartime weapons and vehicles have been replaced with newer models. This is why Halo 4 looks so different to Halo 3. The issue is that for most of Halo 4's story, you are stranded on an alien planet by yourself, having crash landed on a ship that has been drifting in space for four years. The problem then, is that basically all of the weapons and vehicles that you come across, are the post-war variants, rather than the wartime stuff that should have been on the ship you crashed on. From a gameplay perspective, this is negligable: The Battle Riffle is still the Battle Rifle, it just looks rather different. Its just anachronistic, and it bothers me slightly every time I play the game.

This makes sense if you embrace the theory that 343 Games was already sick and tired of Halo.

 

[laggyteabag]

This makes sense if you embrace the theory that 343 Games was already sick and tired of Halo.

343 taking over the Halo franchise, and then immediately redesigning everything to look quite different was certainly a choice.

I understand the "wanting to make your mark" excuse, but it just reeks of the same "but I can do it better" attitude that plagues a lot of adaptions. I'm glad 343 finally came to their senses in this regard, but it is just a shame that it took them two sequels to figure it out.

 

[Worgen]

343 taking over the Halo franchise, and then immediately redesigning everything to look quite different was certainly a choice.

I understand the "wanting to make your mark" excuse, but it just reeks of the same "but I can do it better" attitude that plagues a lot of adaptions. I'm glad 343 finally came to their senses in this regard, but it is just a shame that it took them two sequels to figure it out.

They needed to go into it with the same confidence that Bungie had with Halo 2. Making you play as the Arbiter for half the game was ballsy as hell, but 343 wasn't willing to go that far so they ended up trying to find a way to retread old ground.

 

[laggyteabag]

They needed to go into it with the same confidence that Bungie had with Halo 2. Making you play as the Arbiter for half the game was ballsy as hell, but 343 wasn't willing to go that far so they ended up trying to find a way to retread old ground.

To be fair to 343, they did try this in Halo 5, by making you play as Fireteam Osiris (Locke, Buck, etc) instead of Blue Team (Master Chief, and other Spartan IIs) for most of the game.

This received a lot of backlash, and then in Halo Infinite, you play exclusively as the Master Chief, and Fireteam Osiris and the rest of Blue Team are nowhere to be seen.

The same can kind of be said for Halo 3. Halo 2 received a lot of backlash by forcing your to play as the Arbiter for a large portion of the game, and so the character was relegated in Halo 3 to a co-op partner, and occasional Ai buddy, rather than having his own dedicated storyline.

Obviously people have warmed up to the Arbiter over the years, but it definitely seems as though people do no like playing as anyone other than the Master Chief, unless it is explicitly labelled as a Master Chief-less spin-off.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

The same can kind of be said for Halo 3. Halo 2 received a lot of backlash by forcing your to play as the Arbiter for a large portion of the game, and so the character was relegated in Halo 3 to a co-op partner, and occasional Ai buddy, rather than having his own dedicated storyline.

The Arbiter had a personality, and Halo fans needed time to get used to that.

 

[Worgen]

The same can kind of be said for Halo 3. Halo 2 received a lot of backlash by forcing your to play as the Arbiter for a large portion of the game, and so the character was relegated in Halo 3 to a co-op partner, and occasional Ai buddy, rather than having his own dedicated storyline.

Thats why Halo 2 was the high point for the story in those games and why Halo 3 and onwards the story got worse. Still not bad, but just less interesting in general. Cause it couldn't really go forward, it became locked into what it was, they had to find ways for the elites to become enemies again, Arby got written out of the games and everything needed flood.

 

[Chimpzy]

Dear devs, if your game has voice acting and subtitles, and also language options, let players set the voice and subtitle language separately, k?

Cuz I recently played a game called En Garde!, which presumably takes place somewhere in the Caribbean. I wanted to play it with Spanish voice acting. I don't speak enough Spanish, so I tried putting voice to Spanish but subs to English. But the language setting changes both to whatever language your select. No way to split them.

 

[BrawlMan]

Dear devs, if your game has voice acting and subtitles, and also language options, let players set the voice and subtitle language separately, k?

Cuz I recently played a game called En Garde!, which presumably takes place somewhere in the Caribbean. I wanted to play it with Spanish voice acting. I don't speak enough Spanish, so I tried putting voice to Spanish but subs to English. But the language setting changes both to whatever language your select. No way to split them.

It's weird when games do that. I find it funny that Gungrave Gore avoids this. The only flaw with it is that for some reason the NPCs don't get Japanese audio in gameplay. The enemies will speak English or Korean, but not Japanese. So you could literally play with the japanese dub for cut scenes, and have Korean dialogue come from the enemies. To add to the insanity, Iggymob is a South Korean studio.

 

[NerfedFalcon]

Having played Doom 4 and Doom Eternal, it's hard not to see Warhammer 40000: Space Marine's execution mechanic as being an extremely rough alpha-test version of the Glory Kills from those games. There's two major issues that I have with their execution (ha) in SM. The first is that you have to perform a specific 'stun' attack before you can execute enemies, which requires you to be up close (not an issue) and to actually do it while performing your regular combos, and also hope that the enemy you want to execute has low enough health they'll be stunned without having so little health that the stun attack will kill them outright, which it often will. And God-Emperor help you if your allies decide to kill the stunned enemy you were trying to execute for health.

The second, and much larger, issue is that execution animations are really long, and you don't get I-frames during them, meaning you can take damage and even die while attempting to get your health back. Which is seriously messed up. It should not have taken five years to figure out that dying while you're healing sucks. And, for another comparison, Nero's Devil Bringer animations don't make him invulnerable, but they're not his exclusive method of healing. And speaking of exclusive, if you're at critical health in NuDoom, enemies will drop a few health packs even if you kill them the normal way, so you don't need to get Glory Kills in order to recover your health if you're that desperate in that (much better) game.

I don't know if SM2 fixes those issues, but I'm hoping (for the people here who are going to play it before I do) that it at least alleviates them.

 

[BrawlMan]

Having played Doom 4 and Doom Eternal, it's hard not to see Warhammer 40000: Space Marine's execution mechanic as being an extremely rough alpha-test version of the Glory Kills from those games.

Funny enough, Duke Nukem Forever came out after SM, but before the newer Doom, it has a similar execution to heal mechanic. Though similar to SM, you can possibly die and are not invulnerable during the animations.

 

[Bob_McMillan]

The second, and much larger, issue is that execution animations are really long, and you don't get I-frames during them, meaning you can take damage and even die while attempting to get your health back. Which is seriously messed up. It should not have taken five years to figure out that dying while you're healing sucks.

IIRC, technically, you are invulnerable during executions. Your shields deplete, but your "real" health is unaffected. It just so happens that generally when you need health, you're surrounded by such a gang bang orgy of orks that you die almost instantly once the animation finishes.

I've seen it argued that you shouldn't initiate an execution if you aren't sure you can survive it, which is fair enough, but you're right that it's the only means to regain health so they really should have put more thought into the system.

 

[NerfedFalcon]

IIRC, technically, you are invulnerable during executions. Your shields deplete, but your "real" health is unaffected. It just so happens that generally when you need health, you're surrounded by such a gang bang orgy of orks that you die almost instantly once the animation finishes.

I've seen it argued that you shouldn't initiate an execution if you aren't sure you can survive it, which is fair enough, but you're right that it's the only means to regain health so they really should have put more thought into the system.

I wasn't recording so I don't have a video of it, but I definitely died during the execution animation and my red health was decreasing the entire time.

 

[Bob_McMillan]

I wasn't recording so I don't have a video of it, but I definitely died during the execution animation and my red health was decreasing the entire time.

I was mistaken about red health, it does take damage, but you can't actually die during an execution? I dunno, that's just what I read online when I played the game a few months ago and had the same gripes with the execution system.

 

[Xprimentyl]

Any time a game has your character crank something, and you have to move the analogue stick in a circular motion to simulate the crank. Worse when you're expected to match the position of the analogue stick with the crank on the screen. Look, I'm all for immersion, but you can have that one, games industry.