I played the crap out of GHII and got expert on all the songs, but after that I just didn't get the point in playing the other games. They're just memorization. In much the same vein, I don't get how people can enjoy playing the DDR stuff over and over and over. It's more like work than actually playing a game. Even in WoW, grinding at least makes your character better. In GH/DDR games, you grind forever and earn nothing. You don't even get better at playing a real guitar or actual dancing. What am I missing?
Rhythm games are score-based and heavily competitive. I don't consider a song "beaten" until it is full-comboed or S-ranked or what have you. The notion that you get more out of grinding in an MMO than in DDR is kind of funny, as at least there are athletic/conditioning components to DDR.
Also, I'll agree that I don't even remotely comprehend how anyone over the age of 12 can legitimately defend playing Pokemon as something decent.
I'm playing Platinum during downtime at work right now. Pokemon is also heavily competitive, as it has a versus mode with a phenominal amount of customization.
The real guitar vs Guitar Hero argument was always retarded, but there are people in this thread seriously wondering why people play sports games instead of real sports. Really? The very first commercial video game, Pong, was a derivative of a sport. I'm almost speechless.
There is always so much ignorance and generalizations in these threads that I am continuously dumbfounded that they ever survive past the first page.
Speaking of the Guitar Hero/Rock Band kick, I can understand how people can enjoy playing the games. However, what I don't understand is how people can enjoy shoveling out cash to do the exact same thing they've done on hundreds of other songs.
I played the crap out of GHII and got expert on all the songs, but after that I just didn't get the point in playing the other games. They're just memorization. In much the same vein, I don't get how people can enjoy playing the DDR stuff over and over and over. It's more like work than actually playing a game. Even in WoW, grinding at least makes your character better. In GH/DDR games, you grind forever and earn nothing. You don't even get better at playing a real guitar or actual dancing. What am I missing?
In the case of Rock Band, and to a lesser degree Guitar Hero:World Tour, you're missing the new songs to play. The DLC really adds to the game weeks and months after purchase. Though, it likely doesn't mean much if you see the game as a fancy version of Simon. It's not really the motions and actions, it's the music that goes along with it.
I can, however, understand the exasperation with the sheer volume of music rhythm games to hit the market in the last year or so. Mostly from Activision... The glut of plastic instruments is really choking the floor space in retail land.
And playing any game for any significant amount of time doesn't improve much in the way of real life skills at anything. Except maybe the drums in the RB/GH games. It's not really a convincing argument when it boils down to playing games will only get you better at playing games...
And to add to the general thread, I don't understand the Tekken series. I have difficulty with fighting games in general, but Tekken is really an odd one. Apparently 3 was a really good one, and since then the series seems to have stagnated. Some might say regressed. And yet Namco continues to push this as a game people are supposed to care about.
I really enjoyed Tekken 2 and 3, sat out for TTT and T4, but came back for 5 and found it was quite glorious, if only because they ripped from VF4's single-player structure in all the best ways.
The weird thing about Tekken though is that the older ones are pretty obsolete. I can go back to any Street Fighter and play them just fine; I downloaded Street Fighter Alpha 2 from the PlayStation Store and it still plays wonderfully. But Tekken 2 and 3? It was so discouraging trying to play those games in this day and age.
Virtua Fighter and Tekken (the first of both) turned me off to 3D fighters entirely until Soul Calibur. Soul Edge almost got me, but I played it pretty much like a 2D fighter anyway.
Actually...now that I think about it, it wasn't Soul Calibur; it was Mace: The Dark Age, which I readily admit was a terrible game, but man I loved it for some reason.
I should make a "Games that Suck - Terrible games that you loved" thread but it'd probably just get locked.
Action RPGs :- Why not just call em action games? Obviously because they would be judged as terrible. They take the worst aspect of RPGs (stat-grinding and a god-forsaken menu combat) and apply it to action games (battles are interesting but not a huge cast of characters). The only thing remotely different about RPGs, conversations, are shunted in this format. And to top it off, usually the battles are so horribly implemented and with no synergy between any of the systems that there really isn't any reason to think about anything at all. Why do people like them?
Really curious as to what the fuck game(s) you are actually referring to. An action RPG with "menu combat"?
Rough categories off the top of the head of what games could possibly be called 'action RPG':
- Zelda or Fable like games with one character, actiony combat, and generally very light stat relevance if any: not much stat-grinding or menu combat here.
- Tales or Star Ocean like games where it's just like every other JRPG except battles are action oriented: these particular games actually tend to the larger cast of characters and focus more than average on conversation, though some older entries (Secret of Mana) did not.
- Diablo like games where the focus is basically on improving characters through loot: You imply that the action RPG takes mechanics from the general action game and applies it to an RPG, and the Diablo combat mechanic is entirely different from any remotely modern concept of an action game (and generally not described as 'interesting').
- Possibly you are referring to ATB or FFXII with your 'menu combat' in which case you are on some serious crack (though FFXII can suck it); also, see the second entry above
On topic: Fallout 3 and Oblivion:
I liked these games better when they were called Morrowind and actually innovative and interesting. Morrowind with guns isn't too bad, though I couldn't revive the old magic, but Oblivion is Morrowind with all the cool removed. It's saddening.
Games that I think are probably good but make me break out in hives:
Majora's Mask and Persona series. Any kind of forced timeline or time limit or having to wait around to do stuff or not being able to do stuff because I don't have enough time can die in a fire. Give me games where I have 10 minutes to save the world according to the plot but I can go race chickens instead with no ill effects. I don't care if it breaks your fucking immersion, I want to enjoy the game on my own timetable not yours.
Anything on the Infinity engine, and also Arcanum. Much of it probably relates to the graphical style - the particular isometric angle these games use just offends the eye. The difficulty curve in Arcanum, BG1, and BG2 was massively broken, too, as far as I could tell. You just cruise along doing main quests and side quests and suddenly you get cockblocked by random mercenaries or something that just one shot everyone repeatedly, and you can't really effectively level grind out of it or anything. I'm sure I was making major strategic errors of some sort, possibly related to not using the right buff/debuff spells or something, but if the strategy is that opaque then it's bad game design.
I often see (usually in someone slamming Oblivion's leveling system, which was a fine idea poorly implemented) people praising the fact that in 'old school' RPGs you could explore and end up way in over your head. I loved this in Morrowind, in fact. But in Morrowind, you wouldn't explode when you stumbled across a Daedric shrine - you'd have a very fun and hectic time trying to avoid projectiles and get the hell away from those golden saints or whatever. In IE games it was instant game over, and occurred even if following the main plot with no side exploration whatsoever.
But then, I found Torment to be fairly boring as well, and it didn't have that problem as long as I avoided all combat like the plague. (What combat I did encounter was quite awful.) There was just no guidance, nothing to really do except wander around randomly hoping to stumble across cool stuff, and I just didn't get any sense of a coherent narrative (in the sense of being well-designed and smooth-flowing, rather than in the sense of making sense) from what was touted so often as the pinnacle of game story.
And while its art actually looked quite good except for the mind-destroying perspective and awful dithering that IE provides, one tires a bit of gray with a tinge of brown.
Basically I love the option to explore and do whatever the fuck I want, but I hate being told to just go knock myself and do whatever the fuck I want because the game couldn't be arsed to provide a narrative structure worth a damn.
I have simple tastes, give me guns, explosions, boobs if possible, and usually some sort of story. I do play a few RPGs, but I wouldn't touch most Japanese RPGs with a 10 foot pole, specifically the Final Fantasy series.
I don't know how popular Supreme Commander was, but I didn't really enjoy that.
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"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy."
British publisher and writer Ernest Benn [1875-1954]
Virtua Fighter and Tekken (the first of both) turned me off to 3D fighters entirely until Soul Calibur. Soul Edge almost got me, but I played it pretty much like a 2D fighter anyway.
Actually...now that I think about it, it wasn't Soul Calibur; it was Mace: The Dark Age, which I readily admit was a terrible game, but man I loved it for some reason.
I should make a "Games that Suck - Terrible games that you loved" thread but it'd probably just get locked.
There already is one. Front page even, I think.
Virtua Fighter 4, Evo, and 5 are absolute fighting perfection IMO. I played VF4 Evo from its release all the way until the day I got VF5 for 360, and in that time my personal ranking was over 8,000 matches won (though I did lose over 800).
Like I said, I don't care that you don't like Halo (and yes, I do like it better than any and all PC FPS that I have played). What strikes me as particularly douchey on your part is the implication that I am some sort of troglodyte that just hasn't been exposed to the right types of games.
I can understand that there are plenty of reasons to not like it, but even in a thread about games that you don't get or popular games that you don't like there is no reason to actively insult those that _do_ like the game that you don't.
There is a difference between "I don't like game X for reasons Y and Z" and "the people who like game X need to pull their head out of the console-only world."
I think you guys just have a misunderstanding. Halo is an amazing game...and a lot of people love to play it online just the way it is. I don't. His implication that you haven't played the right games might be a little backwards. I think maybe he just hasn't played Halo the right way (or the way I like to play it anyways).
As a purely first person shooter game there are much better games to play, such as Call of Duty or Counterstrike. But Halo has a lot more on offer than looking around and pulling the trigger. It has immaculate and precise controls, and a lot of objective based gameplay. The stupid community game types that people play in Halo 3, like SWAT and other crap are mostly carry-overs from Halo 2. While I can understand the appeal of those gametypes to an extent, I still feel the only real way to play Halo is CTF (I do realize there is SWAT CTF but I don't care because I still think SWAT is dumb). And not just any CTF, but CTF where your flag must be at base to score.
I think the only games that I have played that had competetively quality CTF were Tribes/Tribes 2. I played Halo for the CTF, the same way I played PGR2 for Cat and Mouse (which they subsequently ruined in PGR3 and 4...much like Halo 2 and 3). Honestly I probably would never have liked Halo if there had not been a random sequence of events that forced me to play it's CTF in those specific settings...where it just became this beautiful strategic chess match that was played out as a first person shooter.
This is not the only way to play Halo though...there are a million ways and if you never stumbled on the one that really spoke to you then you probably wouldn't 'get it'. Playing Halo in slayer is one of the most boring experiences you can have in a game in my opinion...but a well setup CTF game? That can reach the highest levels of entertainment. Really it's tough for me to play any FPS anymore because without that depth of gameplay offered in the original Halo objectivewise...it feels just stupid to me.
But the mention of Gears of War made me realize I never understood that game either. The combat seemed so crappy to me that I couldn't get into it. All of the guns were terribly inaccurate and I felt so out of control of my character the way he attaches to things all the time. Plus the way cover worked it seemed every game played out so similarly...everyone ran up to the same blocks...attached themselves to them...then sprayed bullets over the top of them. It got tiring.
I grew up on Doom, Quake, the original TF Classic, Half life, UT, etc. Played the everliving fuck out of those games.
I first played Halo in college. We would plug our xboxes into the dorm walls and since each floor essentially had a central router, we were able to LAN it up and down the whole hall. I have never, not before or since, had an FPS (hell, even gaming) experience that has rivalled those years at college.
crack open some beers, play some 8-12 player CTF on Blood Gulch. Firing a rocket allllll the way across the map at the bend near the blue base, hitting the warthog carrying the flag perfectly 8 seconds later, seeing it launch into the sky, turning to your friend to say "snipe the survivors" and seeing him headshot them all
only to run down the hallway, burst into the other team's room, and shout "SUCK IT MOTHERFUCKERS!"
good. fucking. times.
the real beauty of Halo was that, since hooking up 3-4 xboxes on a LAN is so much easier and cheaper than bringing 8-12 PC's to somebody's basement and hooking up 328974 chords in order to play, it brought the beauty that is LAN FPS gaming to the masses in an easy, convenient manner. and it deserves major props for that. it also happened to be a damn fun game.
rant about Halo over.
This is exactly what I am talking about...it is an amazing gaming experience.
I basically agree. In many ways Halo 2 and 3 are superior to the first. Everything from visuals to multiplayer options. But by allowing online play it somehow lessened the importance of the game, because the best memories of Halo 1 for me are just those mentioned, 16 people in a tiny apartment eating pizza playing a LAN game. With the room overheating because of all the consoles.
There is something more enjoyable about that 'all round a TV' feeling. It's like Vinyl. Sure, flac audio is better but it lacks that soul. If Halo 3 is a BMW, then Halo 1 is an Alfa. Or you know, some other bullshit analogy.
Halo 2 and 3 gave more options, and lord knows the forge concept was executed so well. But I think when people talk about not liking Halo, and refer to the sequels, I'd have to agree with them. The single player campaign, from a plot/narrative perspective was utter nonsense, and the visuals I think got worse, becoming saturated and shiny and overly flat and simplistic. Moreso the multiplayer while adding lots didn't enhance the experience.
Halo 1 16 player LAN is still more fun than any Halo 2 or 3 online play, for me at least. Something about the difficulty in setting it up, in getting 4 TVs together and having to share a splitscreen. It just felt more satisfactory.
Halo 3 is an excellent game, it really is. From as objective a standing as one can get you do have to recognise the polish it has. Far above the majority of titles out there, matched only perhaps by COD4 on consoles. But it lost it's Halo magic that the series started off with. And I think when people say 'pull your head out of the consoles and experience PC gaming' they're missing a credible criticism of the way the Halo series has gone.
It's fair comment to appropriate criticism to Halo 2 and 3, but nostalgia aside (even for a game only 8 years old), Halo 1 was really an excellent multiplayer experience akin to a Perfect Dark or a Timesplitters 2. Something about splitscreen makes it better.
Halo 1 16 player LAN is still more fun than any Halo 2 or 3 online play, for me at least. Something about the difficulty in setting it up, in getting 4 TVs together and having to share a splitscreen. It just felt more satisfactory.
I...I really don't understand this at all.
Because it made things less convenient for you, it was somehow more satisfactory?
Is it more satisfactory to use a manual can-opener than an electric one?
Halo 1 16 player LAN is still more fun than any Halo 2 or 3 online play, for me at least. Something about the difficulty in setting it up, in getting 4 TVs together and having to share a splitscreen. It just felt more satisfactory.
I...I really don't understand this at all.
Because it made things less convenient for you, it was somehow more satisfactory?
Is it more satisfactory to use a manual can-opener than an electric one?
Satisfaction through effort is the point I was making.
What took me two hours of hauling and cabling and arranging now takes me 30 seconds to log onto XBL. In fact, the console automatically signs on for me, so there is no effort at all.
Satisfaction is a separate issue than fun. Though as I said, I believe the game was inherently more fun regardless of setup.
Fair enough. I just don't really see a big enough difference in the core of the multiplayer other than "it's online" and "they added a bunch of new game types."
Hell, we've done a three-360 setup plenty of times to play Halo 3 in the same room, on separate TVs, and it's glorious.
I really don't miss splitscreen and am glad to see it fading out of existence.
Yeah, Scarab has it. Halo for me is all about a bunch of people hanging out, fragging the hell out of each other (hot seat, because we only had one Xbox. That's right, proper gangsta). In that sense, Halo was the natural successor to Golden Eye. Better, because I actually had a shot at winning at Halo - god damn golden gun mode.
Anyway, popular games that I didn't like... uhm. I dunno. I'm usually the guy who likes stuff no one else does, not the other way around.
But I do hate football games. I've known people obsessed with Pro Evo whatever and I just can't get into it.
Oh, same with driving games. The only one that I've gotten into at all is Burnout Paradise, mainly due to the open world aspect.
And RTS games. I never really got why people were so into Red Alert, and while Star Craft was fun I sucked so much at it that I could never really get into it.
But those aren't really games, they're genres. It wouldn't be fair to pick out games from a genre I didn't like anyway.
Oh, hey. I know. Every single Worms game since the second one has sucked balls. My flatmate bought copies for both the 360 and the DS, and they've both gotten less than five minutes playtime from me.
Virtua Fighter and Tekken (the first of both) turned me off to 3D fighters entirely until Soul Calibur. Soul Edge almost got me, but I played it pretty much like a 2D fighter anyway.
Actually...now that I think about it, it wasn't Soul Calibur; it was Mace: The Dark Age, which I readily admit was a terrible game, but man I loved it for some reason.
I should make a "Games that Suck - Terrible games that you loved" thread but it'd probably just get locked.
There already is one. Front page even, I think.
Virtua Fighter 4, Evo, and 5 are absolute fighting perfection IMO. I played VF4 Evo from its release all the way until the day I got VF5 for 360, and in that time my personal ranking was over 8,000 matches won (though I did lose over 800).
Psh, it was totally on the second page. I can't be bothered to read that far. :P
EDIT: RE: split screen halo; while it was always fun to play with buds in the same room, it sure did make trying to find a good spot to snipe or to avoid the tanks pretty counterproductive when they could just look at your screen and know precisely where you were at.
Also, I'll agree that I don't even remotely comprehend how anyone over the age of 12 can legitimately defend playing Pokemon as something decent
As far as anyone over 40 and half of all women are concerned, nobody over 12 should be playing games at all. Can we stop with this "Only kids can play X" shit?
Not a Pokeman fan myself, but shit. I played a bit and can see how it'd be fun for a lot of people.
Sometimes I'm disappointed with the fact that I'm in my twenties and still playing games, something I've been doing since 3.
This is only when I'm not playing games, though.
You could be 80 and there'd be nothing wrong with playing games. Just ... do it in moderation.
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
edited June 2009
Yes, I suppose if I'm saying that I think that Pokemon is a pretty basic strategy game and thus don't understand how it could be very appealing to people capable of much more abstract that (which would be what happens as people get older) when there are literally tons and tons of more sophisticated strategy games which aren't trying to milk the same franchise for countless millions, it obviously follows that I hate games and believe that games are only for children.
Do I think you're an idiot if you like Pokemon and you aren't a kid? No. Did I ever say anything like that? No. I said that I do not get what the appeal of Pokemon is to an older audience. I did say the wrong thing by using the word "decent" when a more accurate phrase would've been "decently entertaining". As much as people detest when people write off games they consider too childish, I equally detest when people get overly defensive of something like Pokemon. I suppose it's just one of those sacred cows that can only be defended and never, ever criticized.
Anyway, sim games. I actually do understand why people could enjoy playing a game which is trying to realistically simulate driving a car or flying a plane; I'd just rather be playing a game which involves wrecking those things in a spectacular fashion. It's far easier to wreck something than learn how to shave one-tenth of a second of a lap time by picking the optimal route on a track.
Fair enough. I just don't really see a big enough difference in the core of the multiplayer other than "it's online" and "they added a bunch of new game types."
Hell, we've done a three-360 setup plenty of times to play Halo 3 in the same room, on separate TVs, and it's glorious.
I really don't miss splitscreen and am glad to see it fading out of existence.
It's people like you who keep me from having split screen Ghostbusters and Crackdown, and that makes me sad.
Yes, I suppose if I'm saying that I think that Pokemon is a pretty basic strategy game and thus don't understand how it could be very appealing to people capable of much more abstract that (which would be what happens as people get older) when there are literally tons and tons of more sophisticated strategy games which aren't trying to milk the same franchise for countless millions, it obviously follows that I hate games and believe that games are only for children.
Do I think you're an idiot if you like Pokemon and you aren't a kid? No. Did I ever say anything like that? No. I said that I do not get what the appeal of Pokemon is to an older audience. I did say the wrong thing by using the word "decent" when a more accurate phrase would've been "decently entertaining". As much as people detest when people write off games they consider too childish, I equally detest when people get overly defensive of something like Pokemon. I suppose it's just one of those sacred cows that can only be defended and never, ever criticized.
If you wanted to complain about Pokemon, you could have gone with any of the following: tedious grindfest even by JRPG standards, relies on 99% preparation / 1% execution, refusal to change much of anything in the solo quest in well over a decade, a perpetual remake fetish, etc. Those are the usual things I go with when I wonder why I still play it.
But I guess that wouldn't have been as much fun as saying that it's impossible to comprehend how adults could ever legitimately enjoy it, then backpedaling and putting words in people's mouths with a thick layer of condescension to boot.
Do I think you're an idiot if you like Pokemon and you aren't a kid? No. Did I ever say anything like that? No. I said that I do not get what the appeal of Pokemon is to an older audience. I did say the wrong thing by using the word "decent" when a more accurate phrase would've been "decently entertaining". As much as people detest when people write off games they consider too childish, I equally detest when people get overly defensive of something like Pokemon. I suppose it's just one of those sacred cows that can only be defended and never, ever criticized.
The Pokemon metagame is very in depth with lots of hidden values that can win or lose matches. The sheer number of pokemon with a multitude of types and moves make it very challenging and rewarding as a competitive game.
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AxenMy avatar is Excalibur.Yes, the sword.Registered Userregular
Do I think you're an idiot if you like Pokemon and you aren't a kid? No. Did I ever say anything like that? No. I said that I do not get what the appeal of Pokemon is to an older audience. I did say the wrong thing by using the word "decent" when a more accurate phrase would've been "decently entertaining". As much as people detest when people write off games they consider too childish, I equally detest when people get overly defensive of something like Pokemon. I suppose it's just one of those sacred cows that can only be defended and never, ever criticized.
The Pokemon metagame is very in depth with lots of hidden values that can win or lose matches. The sheer number of pokemon with a multitude of types and moves make it very challenging and rewarding as a competitive game.
True that. Sometimes when I poke my head into a Pokemon thread I often wonder what breakthroughs in science could be accomplished if these same people put their heads together toward something like clean energy, space travel, cancer, or environmental concerns.
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A Capellan's favorite sheath for any blade is your back.
As much as people detest when people write off games they consider too childish, I equally detest when people get overly defensive of something like Pokemon. I suppose it's just one of those sacred cows that can only be defended and never, ever criticized.
Attack away, just don't say things are kiddie unless they specifically are (shovelware Wii and DS games, for example).
In this instance, I'll admit I just misinterpreted what you were getting at. To be fair, you're also harping on WW for being "too childish" earlier in this thread, unless I've got you mistaken for someone else (too lazy to doublecheck). You can probably see how I jumped to that conclusion.
I'm not really defending Pokemon specifically, because as I mentioned, I'm not a fan. This is really more of an attacking the audience vs. attacking the game sort of thing, or at least, that's how I read it initially.
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I'm playing Platinum during downtime at work right now. Pokemon is also heavily competitive, as it has a versus mode with a phenominal amount of customization.
The real guitar vs Guitar Hero argument was always retarded, but there are people in this thread seriously wondering why people play sports games instead of real sports. Really? The very first commercial video game, Pong, was a derivative of a sport. I'm almost speechless.
There is always so much ignorance and generalizations in these threads that I am continuously dumbfounded that they ever survive past the first page.
In the case of Rock Band, and to a lesser degree Guitar Hero:World Tour, you're missing the new songs to play. The DLC really adds to the game weeks and months after purchase. Though, it likely doesn't mean much if you see the game as a fancy version of Simon. It's not really the motions and actions, it's the music that goes along with it.
I can, however, understand the exasperation with the sheer volume of music rhythm games to hit the market in the last year or so. Mostly from Activision... The glut of plastic instruments is really choking the floor space in retail land.
And playing any game for any significant amount of time doesn't improve much in the way of real life skills at anything. Except maybe the drums in the RB/GH games. It's not really a convincing argument when it boils down to playing games will only get you better at playing games...
I really enjoyed Tekken 2 and 3, sat out for TTT and T4, but came back for 5 and found it was quite glorious, if only because they ripped from VF4's single-player structure in all the best ways.
The weird thing about Tekken though is that the older ones are pretty obsolete. I can go back to any Street Fighter and play them just fine; I downloaded Street Fighter Alpha 2 from the PlayStation Store and it still plays wonderfully. But Tekken 2 and 3? It was so discouraging trying to play those games in this day and age.
Actually...now that I think about it, it wasn't Soul Calibur; it was Mace: The Dark Age, which I readily admit was a terrible game, but man I loved it for some reason.
I should make a "Games that Suck - Terrible games that you loved" thread but it'd probably just get locked.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
Really curious as to what the fuck game(s) you are actually referring to. An action RPG with "menu combat"?
Rough categories off the top of the head of what games could possibly be called 'action RPG':
- Zelda or Fable like games with one character, actiony combat, and generally very light stat relevance if any: not much stat-grinding or menu combat here.
- Tales or Star Ocean like games where it's just like every other JRPG except battles are action oriented: these particular games actually tend to the larger cast of characters and focus more than average on conversation, though some older entries (Secret of Mana) did not.
- Diablo like games where the focus is basically on improving characters through loot: You imply that the action RPG takes mechanics from the general action game and applies it to an RPG, and the Diablo combat mechanic is entirely different from any remotely modern concept of an action game (and generally not described as 'interesting').
- Possibly you are referring to ATB or FFXII with your 'menu combat' in which case you are on some serious crack (though FFXII can suck it); also, see the second entry above
On topic: Fallout 3 and Oblivion:
I liked these games better when they were called Morrowind and actually innovative and interesting. Morrowind with guns isn't too bad, though I couldn't revive the old magic, but Oblivion is Morrowind with all the cool removed. It's saddening.
Games that I think are probably good but make me break out in hives:
Majora's Mask and Persona series. Any kind of forced timeline or time limit or having to wait around to do stuff or not being able to do stuff because I don't have enough time can die in a fire. Give me games where I have 10 minutes to save the world according to the plot but I can go race chickens instead with no ill effects. I don't care if it breaks your fucking immersion, I want to enjoy the game on my own timetable not yours.
Anything on the Infinity engine, and also Arcanum. Much of it probably relates to the graphical style - the particular isometric angle these games use just offends the eye. The difficulty curve in Arcanum, BG1, and BG2 was massively broken, too, as far as I could tell. You just cruise along doing main quests and side quests and suddenly you get cockblocked by random mercenaries or something that just one shot everyone repeatedly, and you can't really effectively level grind out of it or anything. I'm sure I was making major strategic errors of some sort, possibly related to not using the right buff/debuff spells or something, but if the strategy is that opaque then it's bad game design.
I often see (usually in someone slamming Oblivion's leveling system, which was a fine idea poorly implemented) people praising the fact that in 'old school' RPGs you could explore and end up way in over your head. I loved this in Morrowind, in fact. But in Morrowind, you wouldn't explode when you stumbled across a Daedric shrine - you'd have a very fun and hectic time trying to avoid projectiles and get the hell away from those golden saints or whatever. In IE games it was instant game over, and occurred even if following the main plot with no side exploration whatsoever.
But then, I found Torment to be fairly boring as well, and it didn't have that problem as long as I avoided all combat like the plague. (What combat I did encounter was quite awful.) There was just no guidance, nothing to really do except wander around randomly hoping to stumble across cool stuff, and I just didn't get any sense of a coherent narrative (in the sense of being well-designed and smooth-flowing, rather than in the sense of making sense) from what was touted so often as the pinnacle of game story.
And while its art actually looked quite good except for the mind-destroying perspective and awful dithering that IE provides, one tires a bit of gray with a tinge of brown.
Basically I love the option to explore and do whatever the fuck I want, but I hate being told to just go knock myself and do whatever the fuck I want because the game couldn't be arsed to provide a narrative structure worth a damn.
I don't know how popular Supreme Commander was, but I didn't really enjoy that.
British publisher and writer Ernest Benn [1875-1954]
There already is one. Front page even, I think.
Virtua Fighter 4, Evo, and 5 are absolute fighting perfection IMO. I played VF4 Evo from its release all the way until the day I got VF5 for 360, and in that time my personal ranking was over 8,000 matches won (though I did lose over 800).
I basically agree. In many ways Halo 2 and 3 are superior to the first. Everything from visuals to multiplayer options. But by allowing online play it somehow lessened the importance of the game, because the best memories of Halo 1 for me are just those mentioned, 16 people in a tiny apartment eating pizza playing a LAN game. With the room overheating because of all the consoles.
There is something more enjoyable about that 'all round a TV' feeling. It's like Vinyl. Sure, flac audio is better but it lacks that soul. If Halo 3 is a BMW, then Halo 1 is an Alfa. Or you know, some other bullshit analogy.
Halo 2 and 3 gave more options, and lord knows the forge concept was executed so well. But I think when people talk about not liking Halo, and refer to the sequels, I'd have to agree with them. The single player campaign, from a plot/narrative perspective was utter nonsense, and the visuals I think got worse, becoming saturated and shiny and overly flat and simplistic. Moreso the multiplayer while adding lots didn't enhance the experience.
Halo 1 16 player LAN is still more fun than any Halo 2 or 3 online play, for me at least. Something about the difficulty in setting it up, in getting 4 TVs together and having to share a splitscreen. It just felt more satisfactory.
Halo 3 is an excellent game, it really is. From as objective a standing as one can get you do have to recognise the polish it has. Far above the majority of titles out there, matched only perhaps by COD4 on consoles. But it lost it's Halo magic that the series started off with. And I think when people say 'pull your head out of the consoles and experience PC gaming' they're missing a credible criticism of the way the Halo series has gone.
It's fair comment to appropriate criticism to Halo 2 and 3, but nostalgia aside (even for a game only 8 years old), Halo 1 was really an excellent multiplayer experience akin to a Perfect Dark or a Timesplitters 2. Something about splitscreen makes it better.
I...I really don't understand this at all.
Because it made things less convenient for you, it was somehow more satisfactory?
Is it more satisfactory to use a manual can-opener than an electric one?
Satisfaction through effort is the point I was making.
What took me two hours of hauling and cabling and arranging now takes me 30 seconds to log onto XBL. In fact, the console automatically signs on for me, so there is no effort at all.
Satisfaction is a separate issue than fun. Though as I said, I believe the game was inherently more fun regardless of setup.
Hell, we've done a three-360 setup plenty of times to play Halo 3 in the same room, on separate TVs, and it's glorious.
I really don't miss splitscreen and am glad to see it fading out of existence.
Peeking at your opponents screen was an artform.
Anyway, popular games that I didn't like... uhm. I dunno. I'm usually the guy who likes stuff no one else does, not the other way around.
But I do hate football games. I've known people obsessed with Pro Evo whatever and I just can't get into it.
Oh, same with driving games. The only one that I've gotten into at all is Burnout Paradise, mainly due to the open world aspect.
And RTS games. I never really got why people were so into Red Alert, and while Star Craft was fun I sucked so much at it that I could never really get into it.
But those aren't really games, they're genres. It wouldn't be fair to pick out games from a genre I didn't like anyway.
Oh, hey. I know. Every single Worms game since the second one has sucked balls. My flatmate bought copies for both the 360 and the DS, and they've both gotten less than five minutes playtime from me.
So there'll be screen-peeking with someone I'm playing against on Live?
Psh, it was totally on the second page. I can't be bothered to read that far. :P
EDIT: RE: split screen halo; while it was always fun to play with buds in the same room, it sure did make trying to find a good spot to snipe or to avoid the tanks pretty counterproductive when they could just look at your screen and know precisely where you were at.
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As far as anyone over 40 and half of all women are concerned, nobody over 12 should be playing games at all. Can we stop with this "Only kids can play X" shit?
Not a Pokeman fan myself, but shit. I played a bit and can see how it'd be fun for a lot of people.
This is only when I'm not playing games, though.
You need to play more games, obviously.
I too am not a fan of racing/sports sim games, for the reasons previously stated.
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You could be 80 and there'd be nothing wrong with playing games. Just ... do it in moderation.
Do I think you're an idiot if you like Pokemon and you aren't a kid? No. Did I ever say anything like that? No. I said that I do not get what the appeal of Pokemon is to an older audience. I did say the wrong thing by using the word "decent" when a more accurate phrase would've been "decently entertaining". As much as people detest when people write off games they consider too childish, I equally detest when people get overly defensive of something like Pokemon. I suppose it's just one of those sacred cows that can only be defended and never, ever criticized.
Anyway, sim games. I actually do understand why people could enjoy playing a game which is trying to realistically simulate driving a car or flying a plane; I'd just rather be playing a game which involves wrecking those things in a spectacular fashion. It's far easier to wreck something than learn how to shave one-tenth of a second of a lap time by picking the optimal route on a track.
But I guess that wouldn't have been as much fun as saying that it's impossible to comprehend how adults could ever legitimately enjoy it, then backpedaling and putting words in people's mouths with a thick layer of condescension to boot.
The Pokemon metagame is very in depth with lots of hidden values that can win or lose matches. The sheer number of pokemon with a multitude of types and moves make it very challenging and rewarding as a competitive game.
True that. Sometimes when I poke my head into a Pokemon thread I often wonder what breakthroughs in science could be accomplished if these same people put their heads together toward something like clean energy, space travel, cancer, or environmental concerns.
Attack away, just don't say things are kiddie unless they specifically are (shovelware Wii and DS games, for example).
In this instance, I'll admit I just misinterpreted what you were getting at. To be fair, you're also harping on WW for being "too childish" earlier in this thread, unless I've got you mistaken for someone else (too lazy to doublecheck). You can probably see how I jumped to that conclusion.
I'm not really defending Pokemon specifically, because as I mentioned, I'm not a fan. This is really more of an attacking the audience vs. attacking the game sort of thing, or at least, that's how I read it initially.
oh so it's a poll thread? laters