Your gaming "kryptonite"
- Thread starter Smallfry
- Start date
I don't like games with little to no consequence for my actions, I dislike dying and restarting in the same spot, I dislike not having to think, I want a game that challenges me. I'll take lives or back to the start of the level over autosaving every five seconds any day, but I'm from a different generation of gamers.
you can only beat the game if you play this level on the internet
we don't all have internet at home you bastards
(i'm at school right now)
we don't all have internet at home you bastards
(i'm at school right now)
Turn-based, menu-based combat. I can't play the likes of Final Fantasy anymore because the lack of direct player to character interaction prevents me from caring about the characters enough to save the world. That and spending so many hours of gameplay stuck in limbo with me, two others and the enemies I'm currently against while picking options off a menu, generally being one spamming potions, one spamming white magic and one spamming the most damaging ability I have at the time.
Mine would be the "action spiral"; when a freeroaming, adventurous game starts to reach its climax, and has more and more cutscenes or linear events with no chance of going back or trying something a different way. Happens a lot for adventure games with a heavy story, but some examples...
Crysis
Farenheit
The Longest Journey
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
Dead Rising 2 (last few hours have much fewer side missions)
Crysis
Farenheit
The Longest Journey
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
Dead Rising 2 (last few hours have much fewer side missions)
Really long loading times, and cheap deaths, like the mentioned CoD veteran mode, and the recent Mortal Kombat, I love the game but holy jumping fuckballs the bosses... I swear Shao Khan cheats!
In fighting games: Combos that require you to press opposite directions one after the other, for example, Circle. I ALWAYS press down or up without wanting to and I screw up most of my combos when they introduce commands like that. So in most fighting games, I end up using like 1/8 of the original roster because I suck with the rest.
In FPS: Infinite respawn missions. I always take like 10 minutes to realise I'm stuck in an infinite respawn area. They should totally get rid of them once and for all.
In RPG's and RTS's: TOO MANY STATS. I consider myself a "hardcore gamer" but when it comes to games that have massive amounts of information on screen, I just can't deal with it. I just use the easiest way to beat the level and move along.
That's what I suck at, but I've been reading other posts and I share most of those experiences. Lack of engagement towards a game due to X mechanic they included, stupid AI, bad dubbing (I live in Spain, almost every game comes dubbed and they reuse the same actors over and over, gets old really fast, not to mention those games that just have terrible dubbing, ahemkillzone3ahem), etc...
Also when I was a kid, I couldn't stand games that would throw paranormal enemies at you out of nowhere. Like, you have your typical shooter, you are enjoying it, and all of sudden it becomes a survival horror and you have to shoot down zombies (Far Cry 1, one of the older Red Faction games, Perfect Dark...)
Now I have grown up I understand why do they do it, so the games gets progressively harder and more of a challenge, and I appreciate it. I am also not so easily scared with dark games so that might help too. Still can't play Amnesia for 40 minutes or longer tho...
In FPS: Infinite respawn missions. I always take like 10 minutes to realise I'm stuck in an infinite respawn area. They should totally get rid of them once and for all.
In RPG's and RTS's: TOO MANY STATS. I consider myself a "hardcore gamer" but when it comes to games that have massive amounts of information on screen, I just can't deal with it. I just use the easiest way to beat the level and move along.
That's what I suck at, but I've been reading other posts and I share most of those experiences. Lack of engagement towards a game due to X mechanic they included, stupid AI, bad dubbing (I live in Spain, almost every game comes dubbed and they reuse the same actors over and over, gets old really fast, not to mention those games that just have terrible dubbing, ahemkillzone3ahem), etc...
Also when I was a kid, I couldn't stand games that would throw paranormal enemies at you out of nowhere. Like, you have your typical shooter, you are enjoying it, and all of sudden it becomes a survival horror and you have to shoot down zombies (Far Cry 1, one of the older Red Faction games, Perfect Dark...)
Now I have grown up I understand why do they do it, so the games gets progressively harder and more of a challenge, and I appreciate it. I am also not so easily scared with dark games so that might help too. Still can't play Amnesia for 40 minutes or longer tho...
Not long loading times, but frequent loading times/loading screens that don't fit drive me insane. Sure, it's ok if the loading takes 5 minutes, just make sure the game doesn't have to reload everything when i walk through this door. It really breaks the ambiance of a game for me.
You are running after the main antagonist, he is going to do something really bad if you don't catch him now; just as you are about to reach him... BAM! loading screen. "Town X is known for it's lovely scenery and pleasant inhabitants" What the hell? That's completely disconnected to whats happening with my character!
You are running after the main antagonist, he is going to do something really bad if you don't catch him now; just as you are about to reach him... BAM! loading screen. "Town X is known for it's lovely scenery and pleasant inhabitants" What the hell? That's completely disconnected to whats happening with my character!
Beat 'em ups with loads of crazy, finger mangling, high speed combo attacks.
ARRRRGHH
Screw you, SF2... you were actually playable and it was possible for a less committed player to actually learn and pull off a good number of your combos, but look what evil your kind has visited upon us since.
Seriously, I don't even bother any more. Someone challenges me to a game, I'll just button mash and see if I can actually make headway by simply punching and kicking them several times in quick succession, and blocking in-between. (However, counter-moves are a particular anti-favourite of mine because of how they can totally ruin this strategy and FORCE you to combo... the game then becomes a one-style version of DDR for the fingers which happens to have some pretty graphics)
Mayyybe if I play it a lot I'll go in to practice mode and pick up a few simple ones (like that spinning sword-slashing aerial lunge Sophitia has) but that's it. Can't be arsed with the rest.
That and Bullet Hell games. Both genres appear to not be made for humans, but some kind of advanced video-gaming alien that originally landed in Japan and has since spread across the whole world - and getting them hopelessly addicted to these games is the only way various governments have found of keeping them under control and quietly hidden amongst the human populace.
For that reason, all the stupid stuff surrounding the Touhou games is forever a closed book to me. (9) (9) (9) ? Er ok. Hahaha. Funny joke. WTF?
(It's not just that I'm no longer a kid, and they're kids' games; I'm better now at the complex and twitch-based games that were around when I was 10 years old or less than at the time of their release. The things have just got too complicated for regular people to deal with)
ARRRRGHH
Screw you, SF2... you were actually playable and it was possible for a less committed player to actually learn and pull off a good number of your combos, but look what evil your kind has visited upon us since.
Seriously, I don't even bother any more. Someone challenges me to a game, I'll just button mash and see if I can actually make headway by simply punching and kicking them several times in quick succession, and blocking in-between. (However, counter-moves are a particular anti-favourite of mine because of how they can totally ruin this strategy and FORCE you to combo... the game then becomes a one-style version of DDR for the fingers which happens to have some pretty graphics)
Mayyybe if I play it a lot I'll go in to practice mode and pick up a few simple ones (like that spinning sword-slashing aerial lunge Sophitia has) but that's it. Can't be arsed with the rest.
That and Bullet Hell games. Both genres appear to not be made for humans, but some kind of advanced video-gaming alien that originally landed in Japan and has since spread across the whole world - and getting them hopelessly addicted to these games is the only way various governments have found of keeping them under control and quietly hidden amongst the human populace.
For that reason, all the stupid stuff surrounding the Touhou games is forever a closed book to me. (9) (9) (9) ? Er ok. Hahaha. Funny joke. WTF?
(It's not just that I'm no longer a kid, and they're kids' games; I'm better now at the complex and twitch-based games that were around when I was 10 years old or less than at the time of their release. The things have just got too complicated for regular people to deal with)
If a game took five minutes to load I'd seriously think about returning it and demanding the publisher explain just WTF. That's early 80s kind of loading time. You can read an entire DVD in that time, and an entire CD in half of it. A floppy disk takes 2 minutes in even the slowest drive (typically 60-90 seconds even without a fast "twist" format). That's just crazy.Agent X506 said:
(5 minutes at 1200 baud - typical stock tapeloader speed - will get you 45kb, or enough for a fairly large and complex Spectrum or C64 game... just enough time to go make a cup of tea and a couple rounds of toast. It's also about how long my terribly overloaded and network-hobbled workstation takes to boot into a usable state.)
The frequent, longish load time thing I can sympathise with though. Things like Gran Turismo are terrible for it, like they haven't bothered optimising the positions on the disc or the layout of the data files - even if you're filling up the machine's entire RAM from empty, and only loading at 1/3rd normal speed because you're depacking some very heavily compressed files, it shouldn't take anywhere near as long as it does. It happens every. single. time, even on simple things like going from a main race menu to the setup sub-screen (which is stupidly simplistic), enough that it puts you off from making a series of small tweaks one at a time but changing lots of things fairly crudely (a touch of realism I suppose, but hey - it's a VIDEO GAME, not a military-grade sim... a bit of expedition would be nice). And they don't even have the good courtesy to give you something to do or look in the interim, like the Galaga game that was at the start of the Ridge Racer 4 bonus disc (whilst it loaded and depacked the entirety of the original RR into RAM & VRAM). Just an endlessly spinning speedo dial. Not even a progress bar. There could have been some kind of machinima animation to cover for what was happening (loads the track first, gives you a flyby starting from the first loaded parts whilst the others invisibly stream off the disc; loads your car and you see your driver avatar get in and drive out of the paddock and into the prep area in the pits... then the other ones come out one by one as they load, and they go off for the warm-up lap as the last sundry parts load - once it's all done, you're given an option to skip, or just let the lap play out til they reach the start line...)
Escort missions and Quick Time Events.
Although I didn't mind RE4. i felt they did both things pretty okay, because QTevents are alright in a suspense/horror game, and they were all awesome looking events. And at least Ashley didn't die in one hit, like most escort missions.
Although I didn't mind RE4. i felt they did both things pretty okay, because QTevents are alright in a suspense/horror game, and they were all awesome looking events. And at least Ashley didn't die in one hit, like most escort missions.
I know why they did it and in theory i should love it, because it adds to the tension and requirement for strategy, but all too often I'd have a character get cornered and killed, or the enemy would score three critical hits with archers in a row before I could do anything and then my best character was dead. If there had been some kind of system for revival, like if your downed character can be revived within X number of turns before they die then at least that makes it slightly less frustrating.Yopaz said:
The Ogre Battle series had systems like that, if a character fell they could be revived within a set time frame, and if you didn't save them they had a chance of becoming a zombie or some other unit, so instead of losing them altogether they'd just become far less effective.
Rpgs that have easily missable items and collectibles, that are impossible to go back and get later. Especially if the only way to get it is so arbitrarily complicated that nobody would ever find it without reading an FAQ. The Final Fantasy series is the worst offender, often denying you access to the best weapons and spells if you search the wrong pot in the first half hour of the game (fuck you FF XII)