I never played it but didn't people have high hopes for Tabula Rasa? The WoW-killer MMORPG with Richard Garriott's name attached that promised no more 'collect 10 boar tusks' grindy quests. There must have been something wrong with the game because it sputtered out in a year.
Not only did the game sell badly, but the publishers (NCSoft) decided to kick it while it was down and behave like massive pieces of shit when they fired the lead designer, Richard Garriot, aka Lord British of Ultima Online fame. Now firing the lead designer of a failing game might not seem particularly dickish, except that they also forged a resignation letter on his behalf to make it look like he'd voluntarily moved on, presumably so that they could terminate his stock options, while he was in quarantine from having just come back from space, and thus unable to do a damn thing about it. This isn't speculation by the way, Garriot sued NCSoft and won:
On Nov 11th 2008, an open letter to the players of Tabula Rasa stated that Richard Garriott has left NC Soft to pursue other ventures. The announcement that he was leaving NCAustin and Tabula Rasa was done in an open letter to the community, though he later claimed this letter was in fact written by NCsoft as a means of forcing him out. The announcement was made while Garriott was in quarantine after returning from his spaceflight in October, and the announcement claimed he was inspired by the space travel experience to pursue other interests.
...
Richard Garriott sued NCsoft for $24 million[29] for damages relative to his termination from the parent company NCsoft.[30] Garriott's allegation states that NC Soft terminated his employment, then fraudulently reported his termination as willful resignation in order to preserve the right to terminate Garriot's stock options unless he exercised them himself within 90 days of termination, forcing Garriott into a decision to purchase stock with which a loss was incurred worth dozens of millions in profit for Garriott. Additionally, the news of the termination was issued while Garriott was confined to quarantine from the space flight, which was originally intended to be a publicity move to further promote the game and increase revenue. In July 2010, an Austin District Court awarded Garriott US$28 million in his lawsuit against NCsoft, finding that the company did not appropriately handle his departure in 2008. NCsoft stated that it intended to appeal the decision.[31][32] In October 2011, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirmed the judgment.[33]
I honestly can't explain NCSoft's attitude towards their western properties with anything other than straight-up xenophobia. If a game sells well in Korea, they'll keep it on life support in the U.S even if its a massive turd that nobody outside of Korea gives a shit about (i.e, Lineage), and yet they killed off City of Heroes which was still turning a profit and barely gave Tabula Rasa or Auto Assault a chance to find their feet before murdering them in their cribs. Shit's bananas yo.
Mr Ray on
+16
Options
BeezelThere was no agreement little morsel..Registered Userregular
I want to scrub it out of memory but it's a constant grim reminder in my steam library. I was so salty about that game I've refused to give Gearbox anymore of my money and it's a promise I've kept since.
I know people have reasons for shitting on Other M (most being Samus is talking! BURN IT WITH HELLFIRE!!! back when if first came out), but honestly, I loved it. It was a beautiful mix of old school and new school. Boss fights where crazy and I really pushed my gaming skills playing it. I nwver was a fan of Prime but I really wanted more games like Other M. And the post about getting lost, I got lost tons of times in Super and Fusion. But I love exploring in games so I didn't mind checking ever nook and cranny. I still can't understand people's hate of the Other M except soft gamers forgetting old school hard life*?
*which isn't an attack at the last poster, it's just a general assessment of how new games seem too easy and the internet has made learning how to do things yourself instead of looking up a guide a thing of the past.
0
Options
reVerseAttack and Dethrone GodRegistered Userregular
I still can't understand people's hate of the Other M
It's a sexist piece of garbage that rewrites a previously competent and badass female character into a simpering little girl yearning for daddy's approval.
(most being Samus is talking! BURN IT WITH HELLFIRE!!! back when if first came out)
Don't fucking construct strawpersons.
+10
Options
Dark Raven XLaugh hard, run fast,be kindRegistered Userregular
I remember one game that enjoyed a ridiculous hype cycle was Black on the PS2. That thing went nowhere, but pre release it was being heralded as the second coming of shooters. It was a'ight, but not the genre shattering thing it was supposed to be. IIRC it's coolest thing was modulating the audio of the gunshots in a group of enemies, so no 2 guys firing would have the same stock sound effect, and each one had an 'identity' which was... neat? :I
I remember one game that enjoyed a ridiculous hype cycle was Black on the PS2. That thing went nowhere, but pre release it was being heralded as the second coming of shooters. It was a'ight, but not the genre shattering thing it was supposed to be. IIRC it's coolest thing was modulating the audio of the gunshots in a group of enemies, so no 2 guys firing would have the same stock sound effect, and each one had an 'identity' which was... neat? :I
I remember one game that enjoyed a ridiculous hype cycle was Black on the PS2. That thing went nowhere, but pre release it was being heralded as the second coming of shooters. It was a'ight, but not the genre shattering thing it was supposed to be. IIRC it's coolest thing was modulating the audio of the gunshots in a group of enemies, so no 2 guys firing would have the same stock sound effect, and each one had an 'identity' which was... neat? :I
I still can't understand people's hate of the Other M
It's a sexist piece of garbage that rewrites a previously competent and badass female character into a simpering little girl yearning for daddy's approval.
I didn't see that at all. I saw it as a woman who has been alone for a while and suddenly she meets old friends and she gets to drop the badass route and gets to be human. Until something starts to kill them off. Samus is still human(ish) and it's refreshing to she her not a robot or Arnold Schwarzenegger. I'm not sure where the sexist thing comes from, since her whole thing was classic/cliche "woman can do what men can do" story. Which is kinda the point of the reveal she was a woman at the end of Metroid.
0
Options
L Ron HowardThe duckMinnesotaRegistered Userregular
A big, well known mythology to mine for stories and ideas. Great concept art with a look very different from the WOW aesthetic (which I had become very tired of). Guilds could build castles and the like and fight each other. Third person action controls that was supposed to be more than just clicking on icons from time to time. PVP anywhere.
It sounded great but pretty much disappointed in every way. The controls weren't "action oriented" they were just needlessly complicated. You could just make a macro for them and it became every other MMO out there. The guild stuff took forever and wasn't in working condition even 6 months in. Large areas were broken and for every fix two other things broke. While there was PVP anywhere it was frustrating and not particularly fun so it just became annoying.
Let's not forget that it ran out of combat past the first city, so all there was to do was PvP. And the SP storyline which was awesome at first became very, very dumb after the first 10 levels.
Not to mention the game is a positive experiment of IDWT, wherein they left many places where the players could be dicks to each other, and a ton took that opportunity to do so.
I still can't understand people's hate of the Other M
It's a sexist piece of garbage that rewrites a previously competent and badass female character into a simpering little girl yearning for daddy's approval.
I didn't see that at all. I saw it as a woman who has been alone for a while and suddenly she meets old friends and she gets to drop the badass route and gets to be human. Until something starts to kill them off. Samus is still human(ish) and it's refreshing to she her not a robot or Arnold Schwarzenegger. I'm not sure where the sexist thing comes from, since her whole thing was classic/cliche "woman can do what men can do" story. Which is kinda the point of the reveal she was a woman at the end of Metroid.
Nope. It's sexist garbage. MUCH better people than I have explained it in detail so feel free to do a search on it if you're actually curious but it amounts to Samus becomes an ineffectual "dumb blonde" in the game.
+4
Options
Johnny ChopsockyScootaloo! We have to cook!Grillin' HaysenburgersRegistered Userregular
I still can't understand people's hate of the Other M
It's a sexist piece of garbage that rewrites a previously competent and badass female character into a simpering little girl yearning for daddy's approval.
I didn't see that at all. I saw it as a woman who has been alone for a while and suddenly she meets old friends and she gets to drop the badass route and gets to be human. Until something starts to kill them off. Samus is still human(ish) and it's refreshing to she her not a robot or Arnold Schwarzenegger. I'm not sure where the sexist thing comes from, since her whole thing was classic/cliche "woman can do what men can do" story. Which is kinda the point of the reveal she was a woman at the end of Metroid.
I can sum up one of the glaring problems with Samus' characterization in two words:
THE BABY
THE BABY
THE BABY
THE BABY
THE BABY
THE BABY
Dark Raven XLaugh hard, run fast,be kindRegistered Userregular
Other M also had the most absurd plot points
They engineer out the one metroid weakness; cold resistance. What in the ever loving fuck sense does it make to remove your bioweapon's only kinda weakness. And then the scene where it's revealed? Samus is about to blast a metroid to bits when Adam her supposed father figure shoots her in the fucking back, and then shoots the metroid with an ice beam. Moments before he reveals that he knows they've engineered the weakness out, so he just got lucky and that one was young enough to freeze, so why did he disable Samus before trying to kill the metroid!? She had a better chance at killing it than he did!
Or the part where she suffers through the lava section of the game before Adam enables her Varia function. Why would a defensive option be disallowed out of concern for the safety of the station? Why would Samus respect his choice to leave the function off when she's literally broiling to death inside her shell? Because there's always a scene where Samus suffers through a lava level, it's tradition! But in those other games she doesn't already have the function that can save her life!
Or the part with MB. Which one? Exactly! Fuck that idea.
Or the part where all those round things on the walls were monsters the whole time.
Or the part where the station's security robot thing had a grumpy robot face, which was destroyed to reveal an angry muppet monster face. Think about that. That wasn't some weird mutant that developed after the station went to shit. That was part of the station! THEY BUILT THAT THING!
So yeh that game has more failings than Samus' character assassination.
OH! Gonna throw out another one; Bioshock Infinite. Now, I liked the finished game, thought it had some neat ideas. But the part I liked the most was the first 20 minutes or so, where you just walk around and talk to people. After the intro, the incredible setting is just some window dressing for a long boring slog of samey fights. If you go back and look at those long trailers they showed off years earlier, it looked like a totally different game with a lot more downtime between battles. I dunno if we ever got a post mortem tell all story of Infinite's development, but it sure looked like they cut the hell out of the 'slower' parts, without realizing those were all some people cared about. I wouldn't consider Infinite a failure of a game at all, and it's story is an impressive followup to Bioshock, it's just that it could've been so much more and it looked like it would be.
Oh brilliant
+3
Options
38thDoelets never be stupid againwait lets always be stupid foreverRegistered Userregular
The only thing I really remember about watching a Let's Play of Other M is that Samus doesn't really actually do anything or defeat any of the bad guys. Ridley? Taken out by MB. The Deleter? Also taken out by MB. The section of the station with the unstoppable cold-immune Metroids (previously seen in Metroid 2 and at least one of the Primes)? Taken out by Adam after he nobly shoots Samus in the back while she's menaced by one of those super-Metroids. MB? Taken out by Federation troops.
Samus does get to kill the Metroid Queen, but she basically has the status of just another monster.
WotanAnubis on
+2
Options
L Ron HowardThe duckMinnesotaRegistered Userregular
Samus shuts down everything because it's a military operation and she's not supposed to be there. Adam lets her stay because she's an old friend but he doesn't want Samus in on top secret shit because shes not cleared for it. Keeping the suit shut down was a way to limit her movement. But once it becomes apparent that to learn what's killing his squad is behind some hot rooms and then he has no choice but to let her use it. You forget that Adam knew what was going on (maybe not about MB's true identity but of the other projects going on.) He tries to hide the truth from Samus. Its why he shoots her and then the Metroid. Was it the new ones Samus isn't supposed to know about? Is it a normal one or a youngling? Adam had a mission, Samus was a liability and a weapon but he had to keep her in the dark as much as possible.
0
Options
Johnny ChopsockyScootaloo! We have to cook!Grillin' HaysenburgersRegistered Userregular
Other M stuff
And grown-ass genocidal bounty hunter Samus Aran OF COURSE has to immediately defer to him and commence the hero worship.
Also, she's scared of Ridley and cowers before him. The monster she's personally murdered 5 times, and she's suddenly paralysed with fear of him.
I never played it but didn't people have high hopes for Tabula Rasa? The WoW-killer MMORPG with Richard Garriott's name attached that promised no more 'collect 10 boar tusks' grindy quests. There must have been something wrong with the game because it sputtered out in a year.
Long after Tabula Rasa shuttered, they were still selling a few boxes at my local Target. I hope no poor bastards tried to buy it.
"The Thing" game on PS2/Xbox, based on the John Carpenter movie. If you haven't seen the movie, the main thing is that there's an alien that can perfectly mimic any living creature it touches. It can look and act exactly like you or any other human. It invades an Antarctic research facility and starts picking people off.
So the pitch of the game was that you could recruit NPCs, but you would need to (A) convince them that you weren't a horrible monster and (B) make sure that they weren't horrible monsters. Doing certain actions, like accidentally shooting your buddies in a firefight would make them distrust and possibly turn on you. You could use blood tests to make sure people weren't monsters, but the tests were a rare commodity.
In practice, there was this game mechanic where you could earn "100% trust" or something like that. If you gave a person enough ammo clips or whatever, they would reach "full trust" and then nothing you could ever do would decrease their trust enough for it to matter. It was laughably easy to hit this mark and never have any "trust issues" with your crew in the entire game.
The game also had at least one scripted part where all your followers turn into monsters when you cross an invisible plot trigger in a hallway. Even if you blood test everyone immediately beforehand, they would still transform. I think they did this because they wanted you to face the boss in the next room alone for some reason.
If you approach the game as just another third-person shooter, it's pretty decent. My disappointment came from the main mechanic that got me interested in the game basically being a complete bust.
Remember when Meta Ridley was introduced and Samus's silent expression was "OH, FUCK YOU!?" I miss those days.
But I liked bouncing around as Samabusa and would like nothing more than for Nintendo, Retro, or both to improve the combat and platforming while tossing everything else out, because it was everything I dreamed of in a 3rd person Metroid before all the bullshit came in.
OH! Gonna throw out another one; Bioshock Infinite. Now, I liked the finished game, thought it had some neat ideas. But the part I liked the most was the first 20 minutes or so, where you just walk around and talk to people. After the intro, the incredible setting is just some window dressing for a long boring slog of samey fights. If you go back and look at those long trailers they showed off years earlier, it looked like a totally different game with a lot more downtime between battles. I dunno if we ever got a post mortem tell all story of Infinite's development, but it sure looked like they cut the hell out of the 'slower' parts, without realizing those were all some people cared about. I wouldn't consider Infinite a failure of a game at all, and it's story is an impressive followup to Bioshock, it's just that it could've been so much more and it looked like it would be.
Yep. I never really warmed to the original Bioshock because we only ever got to see the ruins of Rapture. With Infinite, it looked like we would have the chance to explore Columbia in its weird and terrible prime. But then it goes off the (sky)rails. The plot lurches from fetch quest to fetch quest. We have to cross realities, to find the gunsmith, to arm the rebels, etc. The fighting/exploration balance skews so sharply towards fighting, that I just lose interest, except for a few great moments, like Elizabeth dancing at the beach.
OH! Gonna throw out another one; Bioshock Infinite. Now, I liked the finished game, thought it had some neat ideas. But the part I liked the most was the first 20 minutes or so, where you just walk around and talk to people. After the intro, the incredible setting is just some window dressing for a long boring slog of samey fights. If you go back and look at those long trailers they showed off years earlier, it looked like a totally different game with a lot more downtime between battles. I dunno if we ever got a post mortem tell all story of Infinite's development, but it sure looked like they cut the hell out of the 'slower' parts, without realizing those were all some people cared about. I wouldn't consider Infinite a failure of a game at all, and it's story is an impressive followup to Bioshock, it's just that it could've been so much more and it looked like it would be.
Yep. I never really warmed to the original Bioshock because we only ever got to see the ruins of Rapture. With Infinite, it looked like we would have the chance to explore Columbia in its weird and terrible prime. But then it goes off the (sky)rails. The plot lurches from fetch quest to fetch quest. We have to cross realities, to find the gunsmith, to arm the rebels, etc. The fighting/exploration balance skews so sharply towards fighting, that I just lose interest, except for a few great moments, like Elizabeth dancing at the beach.
What really annoyed me is that Infinite never really acknowledged that Booker and Elizabeth jumped to different dimensions where things are different. Like, in this dimension they make a deal (guns in exchange for an airship), but in order to get those guns they have to repeatedly jump dimensions and Elizabeth explicitly tells us they can't jump back home. So they land in a different dimension and they never even try to find out if their deal still holds. Never once do they stop to wonder if they, in this alternate dimension, also struck that same deal with Fitzroy. They just assume it does, because apparently thinking the implications of dimension-hopping through even a little bit is outside the scope of a narrative that hinges on it.
I also disliked the cynical "Comstock and Fitzroy are as bad as each other" tone. But that's an entirely different can of worms.
Pretty much any Final Fantasy after X was a huge letdown to me, with the possible exception of XII which I never played. XIII in particular was such awful assgravy that I swore off the series until I hear universal acclaim for an entry, which I personally believe will never happen. It's sad, too! Square Enix is capable of doing amazing things, even fairly recently, and one need only look at The World Ends With You for proof.
Daikatana was never going to be a good game, but all the ridiculous hype that was built up in advance made the resulting cataclysm all the more egregious. I never bought it and never played it and thank god for that.
The vast majority of launch titles for most consoles, often sold on the promises of 'Hey, this new console is amazing, let us hype you up with these shiny graphics'. Case in point, Perfect Dark Zero. Which really wasn't a bad game, but nowhere near as good as the N64 original and just generally disappointing and forgotten at this point.
I dunno about failing but what about games not being what is expected due to early media releases? I was definitely disappointed in TF2 with it's original media being "realistic-ish" with blackhawks and stuff and then being cartoony.
Yes children, there was a time those graphics was SHIT HAWT and dat spy.... Mmmmm. Now I'm upset.
Still a good game, just not what I wanted out of it. Same with Halo, the 2000video of a rad third person shooter made it look like an open world with native animals and stuff. Why does bungie like teasing games as third person and then cranking out space FPS #7715389? Maybe I'm just jaded.
GASP. @Casually Hardcore I loved Hellgate London! I actually really miss that game...
That's the thing. There's a good game in there; and I think some other company brought up the assets and did something decent with it. There's even a sequel called Hellgate Tokyo that I might check out whenever it's released. But you have to understand that Hellgate London was suppose to be the 'Diablo 3' of its time. The hype train was supersonic at its peak and then it ultimately just tripped over its own dick. A huge shame.
Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning.
Don't get me fucking started on this one. I was 100% on board with this game during its concept. You know what killed it for me? Look at this Ork:
Why in the world is an Ork wearing a goddamn cape? I mean, why in the fuck.....just....god damn it. Granted, this is just fanboy nitpicking but the moment I saw an Ork wearing a fucking cape was the moment when I started to realize that Warhammer Online was not the MMO we all wanted and deserved.
I have been a huge fan of the series, and red alert up to that point. C&C4 was just utter crap. it looked like shit, it played like shit. 3 was vastly superior. I couldnt even finish 4.
And talk about one of my favorite games of two generations ago, Advent Rising! Epic space opera trilogy with a story assist from Orson Scott Card, gameplay involving bullet time and special, jedi/wizard like powers? Dual wielding rocket launchers? There's no part of the game that should have been terrible.
Except the gameplay was broken as fuck. I mean, I love it, but the Lift power was especially bad. Target a piece of rubble and throw it at a dude with your mind! Then that rubble shatters, and your lock-on reticle stays locked onto that spot. Frame rate and crash bugs, some control issues during jumping bits...
I mean, if you avoid the Lift power it is mostly playable, and I love the rest of the game really. There really was nothing like it at the time... climb on a big dumb alien's back, snap his neck, and then ride the corpse to the ground in slow motion while headshotting his two buddies. But man, it was broken.
They even had a million dollar prize thing in the game. It would update through Xbox Live with some goofy scavenger hunt stuff, and the players who did it the fastest would be entered to win at the end. Except sales of the game were so low they had to cancel, and instead participants received a couple of games. One was Psychonauts, so it wasn't all bad, but...
And those low sales meant the other two chapters were never made. The game ends in a massive cliffhanger, with your character transported to some icy planet, met by an unknown alien species, and fades out on a "to be continued..." note. Ugh. UGH!
God damn this game. Despite being buggy and unfinished I still played through it a couple times because the game was still that interesting. The amount of wasted potential here is just saddening and knowing that it would take a god damn miracle to return to this game world makes me sad to this day.
In before someone goes on an "Orson Scott Card is a prick" rant.
A big, well known mythology to mine for stories and ideas. Great concept art with a look very different from the WOW aesthetic (which I had become very tired of). Guilds could build castles and the like and fight each other. Third person action controls that was supposed to be more than just clicking on icons from time to time. PVP anywhere.
It sounded great but pretty much disappointed in every way. The controls weren't "action oriented" they were just needlessly complicated. You could just make a macro for them and it became every other MMO out there. The guild stuff took forever and wasn't in working condition even 6 months in. Large areas were broken and for every fix two other things broke. While there was PVP anywhere it was frustrating and not particularly fun so it just became annoying.
Let's not forget that it ran out of combat past the first city, so all there was to do was PvP. And the SP storyline which was awesome at first became very, very dumb after the first 10 levels.
Not to mention the game is a positive experiment of IDWT, wherein they left many places where the players could be dicks to each other, and a ton took that opportunity to do so.
the video of the guy sitting on the mountain trail with a horse just kicking ever passerby off a cliff is glorious though
+2
Options
L Ron HowardThe duckMinnesotaRegistered Userregular
Would Kingdoms of Amalur and its MMO count?
I remember all the hype before all the drama really hit the internet, and it really did look like it had a lot of potential. And then it bankrupted the state of Rhode Island, and had to be rushed out the doors so that it could make back some money, IIRC. And the MMO will never see the light of day.
I have been a huge fan of the series, and red alert up to that point. C&C4 was just utter crap. it looked like shit, it played like shit. 3 was vastly superior. I couldnt even finish 4.
Can you elaborate? I've played every c&c game except 4
This was the game that broke the camel's back on MMO's for me. I fondly remember Galaxies, Everquest, and World of Warcraft (haven't played since Cataclysm was released). I endured the pain of Warhammer, Hellgate London, Age of Conan, and Aion.
This was to be my salvation, by reward for having been given a steaming turd in return for subscription money for so many years. But no, what I got was an incredible online single player game. SW:ToR has a great, fantastic single player. Holy hell was it a terrible MMO, however. I should have expected this coming from Bioware, a company with no practical experience in developing, deploying, or maintaining multiplayer games.
Where to even begin? First, the engine sucked salad. Worked fine for single player games, just as that engine had for years, but suddenly put more than 20 people in proximity and it shit the bed. This made the oft-advertised World PVP a joke, as getting anyone into a close area meant the game would crash or it would become unsustainably laggy. This had a devastating effect on one of the most innovative PVP arenas I've ever seen: Huttball. Basically an MMO implementation of Ultimate Frisbee, with skills tossed in. But, because PVP performance was so terrible, it became nearly impossible to land a pass in Huttball.
The group content was lackluster, cookie-cutter at best, and poorly designed at worst. What compelling storylines you had experienced during singleplayer were thrown out the door for bland, pointless events in group settings. Not to mention most of the dungeons/raids were buggy as shit, with no fixes in sight.
So, no group PVE, and hobbled PVP. Games have survived worse, certainly there was a good community to keep things together until patches hit? Nope. Poor server management led to vastly disproportionate populations. Predictably, a majority of individuals rolled Sith. However, by not capping populations, this meant that on the most balanced servers, still over 65% of the population was Sith. This also detracted from PVP, and made certain game elements impossible to experience because Sith retained 100% control. Then, when players began abandoning ship, they flat out refused to merge servers, further crippling the game. The point I decided to leave was 90 days after release. Mind you, there is only 1 'city' per faction, and I logged in at 7 PM on an evening, primetime, and there were only 3 Republic players in the fleet. (Equivalent of only three people in Ironforge during WoW:Vanilla). And this was on a Day:1 server!
I still will never forgive Bioware for the hot-mess trifecta they fed me via Mass Effect 3 Ending, DA 2 Gameplay/Asset Reuse, and SW:ToR mismanagement. Especially because I bought Collector's Edition on SW:ToR.
On the plus side, I sold the Darth Malgus statue that came with it for about $50, and was eventually able to sell the soundtrack and art book.
I have been a huge fan of the series, and red alert up to that point. C&C4 was just utter crap. it looked like shit, it played like shit. 3 was vastly superior. I couldnt even finish 4.
Can you elaborate? I've played every c&c game except 4
The graphics were very blocky, poorly textured, movement and response to actions were slow and draggy, very few units on the opposite sides were actually different from each other, it was buggy in several ways and dispite it was suppose to put an end to the storyline of C&C i got halfway through it and just couldnt make myself care about how it ended if only i could stop playing the game. So i gave up on it.
eh SWTOR was okay, they just made the mistake of opening way too many servers at launch. Aside from that they did a pretty good job; their failing was basically Not Being Blizzard, which most companies that have tried making MMOs are guilty of.
The thing that ultimately disappointed me about bioshok: infinite was just that all the combat wound up feeling boring and same-y; just move down a corridor (admittedly, usually a really pretty corridor) shooting guys and using a couple of simple-ish abilities. In my head I just kept comparing the combat to ME3, and infinite always felt lacking.
also I didn't like the ending but whatever
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Posts
Not only did the game sell badly, but the publishers (NCSoft) decided to kick it while it was down and behave like massive pieces of shit when they fired the lead designer, Richard Garriot, aka Lord British of Ultima Online fame. Now firing the lead designer of a failing game might not seem particularly dickish, except that they also forged a resignation letter on his behalf to make it look like he'd voluntarily moved on, presumably so that they could terminate his stock options, while he was in quarantine from having just come back from space, and thus unable to do a damn thing about it. This isn't speculation by the way, Garriot sued NCSoft and won:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabula_Rasa_%28video_game%29
I honestly can't explain NCSoft's attitude towards their western properties with anything other than straight-up xenophobia. If a game sells well in Korea, they'll keep it on life support in the U.S even if its a massive turd that nobody outside of Korea gives a shit about (i.e, Lineage), and yet they killed off City of Heroes which was still turning a profit and barely gave Tabula Rasa or Auto Assault a chance to find their feet before murdering them in their cribs. Shit's bananas yo.
I want to scrub it out of memory but it's a constant grim reminder in my steam library. I was so salty about that game I've refused to give Gearbox anymore of my money and it's a promise I've kept since.
"...only mights and maybes."
*which isn't an attack at the last poster, it's just a general assessment of how new games seem too easy and the internet has made learning how to do things yourself instead of looking up a guide a thing of the past.
It's a sexist piece of garbage that rewrites a previously competent and badass female character into a simpering little girl yearning for daddy's approval.
Don't fucking construct strawpersons.
I remember that one. Played it on the XBOX and it did deliver on its promised destructible environments.
And then, years later, all of those things got rolled into Battlefield.
but they're listening to every word I say
I didn't see that at all. I saw it as a woman who has been alone for a while and suddenly she meets old friends and she gets to drop the badass route and gets to be human. Until something starts to kill them off. Samus is still human(ish) and it's refreshing to she her not a robot or Arnold Schwarzenegger. I'm not sure where the sexist thing comes from, since her whole thing was classic/cliche "woman can do what men can do" story. Which is kinda the point of the reveal she was a woman at the end of Metroid.
Let's not forget that it ran out of combat past the first city, so all there was to do was PvP. And the SP storyline which was awesome at first became very, very dumb after the first 10 levels.
Not to mention the game is a positive experiment of IDWT, wherein they left many places where the players could be dicks to each other, and a ton took that opportunity to do so.
Nope. It's sexist garbage. MUCH better people than I have explained it in detail so feel free to do a search on it if you're actually curious but it amounts to Samus becomes an ineffectual "dumb blonde" in the game.
I can sum up one of the glaring problems with Samus' characterization in two words:
THE BABY
THE BABY
THE BABY
THE BABY
THE BABY
Steam ID XBL: JohnnyChopsocky PSN:Stud_Beefpile WiiU:JohnnyChopsocky
Or the part where she suffers through the lava section of the game before Adam enables her Varia function. Why would a defensive option be disallowed out of concern for the safety of the station? Why would Samus respect his choice to leave the function off when she's literally broiling to death inside her shell? Because there's always a scene where Samus suffers through a lava level, it's tradition! But in those other games she doesn't already have the function that can save her life!
Or the part with MB. Which one? Exactly! Fuck that idea.
Or the part where all those round things on the walls were monsters the whole time.
Or the part where the station's security robot thing had a grumpy robot face, which was destroyed to reveal an angry muppet monster face. Think about that. That wasn't some weird mutant that developed after the station went to shit. That was part of the station! THEY BUILT THAT THING!
So yeh that game has more failings than Samus' character assassination.
OH! Gonna throw out another one; Bioshock Infinite. Now, I liked the finished game, thought it had some neat ideas. But the part I liked the most was the first 20 minutes or so, where you just walk around and talk to people. After the intro, the incredible setting is just some window dressing for a long boring slog of samey fights. If you go back and look at those long trailers they showed off years earlier, it looked like a totally different game with a lot more downtime between battles. I dunno if we ever got a post mortem tell all story of Infinite's development, but it sure looked like they cut the hell out of the 'slower' parts, without realizing those were all some people cared about. I wouldn't consider Infinite a failure of a game at all, and it's story is an impressive followup to Bioshock, it's just that it could've been so much more and it looked like it would be.
I'm pretty sure that was posted in the Metroid thread where I read it. It ties all the issues with the game together and the conclusion isn't great.
Samus does get to kill the Metroid Queen, but she basically has the status of just another monster.
It's the same two words repeated six times.
Your move -_-
Having played Invisible War before the original, I actually enjoyed the hell out of that game. It's pretty terrible as a Deus Ex sequel though.
Also, she's scared of Ridley and cowers before him. The monster she's personally murdered 5 times, and she's suddenly paralysed with fear of him.
Steam ID XBL: JohnnyChopsocky PSN:Stud_Beefpile WiiU:JohnnyChopsocky
"The Thing" game on PS2/Xbox, based on the John Carpenter movie. If you haven't seen the movie, the main thing is that there's an alien that can perfectly mimic any living creature it touches. It can look and act exactly like you or any other human. It invades an Antarctic research facility and starts picking people off.
So the pitch of the game was that you could recruit NPCs, but you would need to (A) convince them that you weren't a horrible monster and (B) make sure that they weren't horrible monsters. Doing certain actions, like accidentally shooting your buddies in a firefight would make them distrust and possibly turn on you. You could use blood tests to make sure people weren't monsters, but the tests were a rare commodity.
In practice, there was this game mechanic where you could earn "100% trust" or something like that. If you gave a person enough ammo clips or whatever, they would reach "full trust" and then nothing you could ever do would decrease their trust enough for it to matter. It was laughably easy to hit this mark and never have any "trust issues" with your crew in the entire game.
The game also had at least one scripted part where all your followers turn into monsters when you cross an invisible plot trigger in a hallway. Even if you blood test everyone immediately beforehand, they would still transform. I think they did this because they wanted you to face the boss in the next room alone for some reason.
If you approach the game as just another third-person shooter, it's pretty decent. My disappointment came from the main mechanic that got me interested in the game basically being a complete bust.
But I liked bouncing around as Samabusa and would like nothing more than for Nintendo, Retro, or both to improve the combat and platforming while tossing everything else out, because it was everything I dreamed of in a 3rd person Metroid before all the bullshit came in.
Yep. I never really warmed to the original Bioshock because we only ever got to see the ruins of Rapture. With Infinite, it looked like we would have the chance to explore Columbia in its weird and terrible prime. But then it goes off the (sky)rails. The plot lurches from fetch quest to fetch quest. We have to cross realities, to find the gunsmith, to arm the rebels, etc. The fighting/exploration balance skews so sharply towards fighting, that I just lose interest, except for a few great moments, like Elizabeth dancing at the beach.
What really annoyed me is that Infinite never really acknowledged that Booker and Elizabeth jumped to different dimensions where things are different. Like, in this dimension they make a deal (guns in exchange for an airship), but in order to get those guns they have to repeatedly jump dimensions and Elizabeth explicitly tells us they can't jump back home. So they land in a different dimension and they never even try to find out if their deal still holds. Never once do they stop to wonder if they, in this alternate dimension, also struck that same deal with Fitzroy. They just assume it does, because apparently thinking the implications of dimension-hopping through even a little bit is outside the scope of a narrative that hinges on it.
I also disliked the cynical "Comstock and Fitzroy are as bad as each other" tone. But that's an entirely different can of worms.
Daikatana was never going to be a good game, but all the ridiculous hype that was built up in advance made the resulting cataclysm all the more egregious. I never bought it and never played it and thank god for that.
Yes children, there was a time those graphics was SHIT HAWT and dat spy.... Mmmmm. Now I'm upset.
Still a good game, just not what I wanted out of it. Same with Halo, the 2000video of a rad third person shooter made it look like an open world with native animals and stuff. Why does bungie like teasing games as third person and then cranking out space FPS #7715389? Maybe I'm just jaded.
Because the Wow engine they stole had capes.
I have been a huge fan of the series, and red alert up to that point. C&C4 was just utter crap. it looked like shit, it played like shit. 3 was vastly superior. I couldnt even finish 4.
God damn this game. Despite being buggy and unfinished I still played through it a couple times because the game was still that interesting. The amount of wasted potential here is just saddening and knowing that it would take a god damn miracle to return to this game world makes me sad to this day.
the video of the guy sitting on the mountain trail with a horse just kicking ever passerby off a cliff is glorious though
I remember all the hype before all the drama really hit the internet, and it really did look like it had a lot of potential. And then it bankrupted the state of Rhode Island, and had to be rushed out the doors so that it could make back some money, IIRC. And the MMO will never see the light of day.
Can you elaborate? I've played every c&c game except 4
Star Wars: The Old Republic.
This was the game that broke the camel's back on MMO's for me. I fondly remember Galaxies, Everquest, and World of Warcraft (haven't played since Cataclysm was released). I endured the pain of Warhammer, Hellgate London, Age of Conan, and Aion.
This was to be my salvation, by reward for having been given a steaming turd in return for subscription money for so many years. But no, what I got was an incredible online single player game. SW:ToR has a great, fantastic single player. Holy hell was it a terrible MMO, however. I should have expected this coming from Bioware, a company with no practical experience in developing, deploying, or maintaining multiplayer games.
Where to even begin? First, the engine sucked salad. Worked fine for single player games, just as that engine had for years, but suddenly put more than 20 people in proximity and it shit the bed. This made the oft-advertised World PVP a joke, as getting anyone into a close area meant the game would crash or it would become unsustainably laggy. This had a devastating effect on one of the most innovative PVP arenas I've ever seen: Huttball. Basically an MMO implementation of Ultimate Frisbee, with skills tossed in. But, because PVP performance was so terrible, it became nearly impossible to land a pass in Huttball.
The group content was lackluster, cookie-cutter at best, and poorly designed at worst. What compelling storylines you had experienced during singleplayer were thrown out the door for bland, pointless events in group settings. Not to mention most of the dungeons/raids were buggy as shit, with no fixes in sight.
So, no group PVE, and hobbled PVP. Games have survived worse, certainly there was a good community to keep things together until patches hit? Nope. Poor server management led to vastly disproportionate populations. Predictably, a majority of individuals rolled Sith. However, by not capping populations, this meant that on the most balanced servers, still over 65% of the population was Sith. This also detracted from PVP, and made certain game elements impossible to experience because Sith retained 100% control. Then, when players began abandoning ship, they flat out refused to merge servers, further crippling the game. The point I decided to leave was 90 days after release. Mind you, there is only 1 'city' per faction, and I logged in at 7 PM on an evening, primetime, and there were only 3 Republic players in the fleet. (Equivalent of only three people in Ironforge during WoW:Vanilla). And this was on a Day:1 server!
I still will never forgive Bioware for the hot-mess trifecta they fed me via Mass Effect 3 Ending, DA 2 Gameplay/Asset Reuse, and SW:ToR mismanagement. Especially because I bought Collector's Edition on SW:ToR.
On the plus side, I sold the Darth Malgus statue that came with it for about $50, and was eventually able to sell the soundtrack and art book.
The graphics were very blocky, poorly textured, movement and response to actions were slow and draggy, very few units on the opposite sides were actually different from each other, it was buggy in several ways and dispite it was suppose to put an end to the storyline of C&C i got halfway through it and just couldnt make myself care about how it ended if only i could stop playing the game. So i gave up on it.
The thing that ultimately disappointed me about bioshok: infinite was just that all the combat wound up feeling boring and same-y; just move down a corridor (admittedly, usually a really pretty corridor) shooting guys and using a couple of simple-ish abilities. In my head I just kept comparing the combat to ME3, and infinite always felt lacking.
also I didn't like the ending but whatever
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget