The Deadpool said:
The more I read, the more I'm convinced you never played the game. On ym first playthrough, I had to redo maybe half the stages. And even those maybe one or two were redone more than twice.
It's not about repetition like people seem to think.
The game's harsh punishment for death is offset by death being easily avoidable for someone with care and patience. Hand-eye coordination helps, but not running blindly around the corner will keep you alive far more often than quick dodging will...
Uhm... You're right. I haven't played DS yet--
and I said that in my first comment. From my original post on the topic:
solidstatemind said:
All that being said, I'll probably take a spin at DS over at my friend's house. He really enjoys it, and he usually isn't quite as good a gamer as I am, so maybe Yahtzee is being a bit hyperbolic... (but that doesn't mean his point completely lacks validity however.)
No, I don't explicitly say it, but I think it's reasonable to expect people to conclude I haven't played the game from that statement.
But this isn't the Demon's Souls review we're commenting on here, so whether or not I played the game is only tangentally relevant. This Extra Punctuation was the exposition on how Yahtzee feels the use of artificially long periods between checkpoints as not being a viable game mechanic, rather a cop-out on the part of game developers--- that's it; that's all. I don't think I'm reading it wrong to say that while the thought process might've been initiated for him by the feedback on the DS ZP review, this was generally non-specific to Demon's Souls. Perhaps DS is the exception to the rule, but a single exception does not necessarily invalidate his point. And I have been arguing in support of his position, non-specific to any game. I simply thought that there were aspects that he didn't cover for whatever reason that worthy of consideration in this context. OK, and I got a little tired of the "Haha, the truth is you suck" crowd acting like that is any sort of a legitimate argument whatsoever, too.
I think if you consider my comments in light of that information and leave out any direct application of them to DS specifically, they will make much more sense, particularly in re: mindless repetition, the senselessness of trophy/award elitism, and, of course, the monkeys. (Can't leave out the monkeys. They get angry.)
To provide a quick recap of my argument:
I have a friend who enjoys Demon's Souls. He usually gets frustrated with games more easily than I do, so I'm going to guess that Yahtzee is probably exaggerating
a lot about Demon's Souls specifically.
(Actually, new input here: reading between the lines of the ZP review and noting that he didn't drive the fact that DS is at least JRPG-like, a genre he normally loathes, into the ground definitely says something to me: I was going to give it at least a rental based upon that observation alone. I bet you he actually liked it a lot; but it's his job to
generate traffic, and nothing generates traffic like dissention. Don't you think that with the flood of email saying "Yahtzee, please check out Demon's Souls! Itz teh B0mBz!", he didn't make the conscious decision that he was going to have to beat the piss out of something about the game? And it worked--
715 comments on the ZP Review as of this writing, not including the hot lava flows of the EP. Added together it surpasses the hate-fountain of SSBB... and that's saying something!)
HOWEVER, as much as people love to defend a favorite game like they do a child, that exaggeration about Demon's Souls does not invalidate what he is saying about the core issue in general: putting long periods of time between checkpoints is not really a legitmate 'game mechanic'; it's really just lazy game design. I agree with his opinion on this, and think the people who disagree-- again, this is
without specificity to DS-- are wrong. What it is, is a way to a) artificially lengthen the playtime of a game, and b) make a game appear harder by attempting to use frustration to simulate difficulty. {Supporting reasons can be found in previous posts.} Some folks- yourself included- have made interesting counter-arguments, but I can't help but notice that that are almost completely (if not 100%) based upon Demon's Souls ... and while it might be interesting to speculate how to use this EP to invalidate some of Yahtzee's original points in the ZP, the central thesis remains intact: 90% of the time, long periods between checkpoints is a bullshit move by the game developer.
The only way I brought DS into this specific conversation was to idlely wonder whether or not its difficulty might actually be a disservice by reducing its fanbase via turning off people who are more recreational gamers than challenge-seekers. And again, that wasn't necessarily a critique of the game itself, it was just a random observation.
But as a postscript, I still think the people who can only muster responses of "Yahtzee is a crybaby. Grow a pair." without any reasonable support are being ridiculously, irrationally defensive of DS (i.e.- fanboys), regardless of how good the game may or may not be, they certainly aren't making it more appealing to people such as myself. That I'm responding to you means that your arguments don't fall into that category, btw.
If folks TL;DR'd. Sorry: nothing much to do at work right before the holidays. Gives me plenty of time to ramble on and on (and on... and on...)
EDIT: Oh, and being a coder, I can tell you that the difficulty level can be used to accomplish much of what the "we want a challenge" crowd seeks, IF the developer bothers to think outside the established paradigms of "harder difficulty = monsters with more health/player with less health and ammo".
