I'll have to try these games. I'm always hearing about how brutally difficult they are, but everyone seems to enjoy them in spite of this...or perhaps BECAUSE of this?
I will be honest they are not really that brutal. If you grew up with any type of older games that didn't hold your hand then you will feel right at home. You have to learn how to play and what works where. You are not presented with a fire boss right after getting an ice weapon and so on. You have to pay attention which is something gamers today are not used to and it was a breath of fresh air for them. I think everyone should at least try it and start with Demon's Souls if you can. I honestly prefer Demon's Souls, then Dark Souls and Dark Souls 2 was good but didn't have the same mystery the others did.
Cool people I have bought stuff from on this board: orrimarrko kyosuke75 dave2236 video_game_addict cloudstrife29661 NESCollector75
Modern video games are too focused on being realistic. The age of the 3D game has become too concerned with making the video game an expression of the first person point of view. The whole point of a video game though is to get away from reality as it currently exists and enter into other modes of being, like 2nd, and 3rd person points of view when playing the game.
Unfinished, released games with infinite patches in the first weeks of release. Beta test the damn thing, and when its ready, release it. Looking at you, Halo:MCC
Intrusive IAP's and on-disc DLC are a no-no. Download services (Origin, U-Play, etc.) aren't going away, but hopefully there won't be more of them. Day one updates seem to be a problem that gets worse with time, but mainly on consoles. Probably the number one offender for me would be games like The Sims that require expansion packs in order to be fun*, or games that feel like expansion packs themselves.
*I was fine with it in 1 and 2, but from 3 onwards you can tell they were just being greedy. Now nobody even wants TS4 since we all know what's coming next.
Last edited by Dr. BaconStein; 01-22-2015 at 12:49 AM.
Knowing EA they'd handle The Sims 4 like their Tiger Woods exploitation wrap. Back when they did the 2013 game they changed how they handled it. Before you got the game with the golfers and courses. They caught hell, and why? They sold a game for full price, kept back a lot of content, and ended up piecing out many of the formerly included courses for a charge in packs. Suddenly that $60 game was $110 or $127 depending which edition you bought, and all the while you'd get nagged online if you didn't buy the stuff because other people would have and you'd get excluded from stuff that was included in the 2012 release. That's EA for you, they take IAP style bitchery and puts it on a full blown console/computer game instead of on your phone.
Imagine the Sims 4, you buy it for $60, and you end up allowed maybe 2 character slots/houses, but any addition person/house is a fee. And then of course you have a game let's say with a 1000 items, but only 400 of them are included, the other 600 items will come in theme packages for $10 here $15 there. Suddenly to be able to play the sims with others online without punishment/exclusion it'll set you back a few hundred dollars.
The modern trend spearheaded by EA is to sell you $60 storefront software from which the user must buy DLC and microtransaction "consumables" to get the whole game.
Yup that's what I broke down and it's the sleaziest form of selling video games (console, computer, handheld) pulling that crap. It takes big balls charging full price for 1/2 of less of a game to then charge maybe double or more that cost to get it all. Stuff like Tiger Woods where just the year before was all there shows clear malice, not like they later figured, wow the Augusta course would be awesome.
I really don't buy EA games anymore at all, the WiiU was the last of it in how they burned WiiU owners with their grossly delayed Mass Effect 3 for $10 more than the Trilogy others got, then the bungled NFS game and so on. They're entirely untrustworthy and if you really wanted to dig, we could rip into how shitty ORIGIN is they force on all their consumers too. I'd love to play Dead Space again, but that's Origin saddled filth on PC so I won't buy it.
Dude, I completely know what you mean. The final boss battle in the PSP game Prinny: Can I Really Be the Hero? is a bane of my existence. Even if you know what you are doing, even if you avoid every attack and manage to stay on the meager platform in the middle of the stage surrounded by huge bottomless pits, it is all for naught if you can't button mash the hell out of the attack button in this fight. In every boss fight until this point you could stun the enemy if you bounced on its weak spot at the right time, and then you could hit it for big damage. But in this fight... NO! You can never stun the boss, so the most damage your attack can do is a tiny sliver of miniscule damage. You literally have to hit the boss over 100 (hundreds even?) of times to defeat him. You get 3 HP on your health bar if you aren't playing on the 1 HP 'hardcore' mode, but even on 'normal' (or do they call it 'casual'?) mode, if the boss hits you in the wrong direction you'll just die instantly anyway from falling into one of the two bottomless pits. Oh, and I should mention, YOU ONLY HAVE THREE MINUTES TO GET THESE HUNDREDS OF HITS ON THE BOSS. I hate that boss fight, and because I wasn't willing to cheat or use someone else's save file, I have never progressed further in that game. And that's a shame, because there's 50% more game content after that thanks to a neat new game mode with its own story where you play as a different character.
I hate cut scenes you can't skip! But let's add to that that I also hate non-skippable start screens, splash screens, and startup videos. Just go straight to the main menu! I don't care who published the game, who developed the game, what video codes you are using, nor do I want to see your 'fancy' startup videos! Save those for a New Game or the end credits. If you have to show them due to contractual agreements, make them as short as possible and skippable. And stop having us press start (or any other button) to bring up the frickin' main menu! Once the game boots, just show the menu. There's no reason to require pressing start every time!
Everyone who has ever played the Vermilion escort mission in VVVVVV knows exactly what you mean. That Vermilion character was one of the most useless, death-prone characters that a player has ever needed to rescue in a game.
You know what else is played out along the lines of the overly pointlessly long boss battle?
The overly long and brutal run up to the final boss which is worse than the boss itself, usually gets your ass beat near to death if not killed and depleted of your ammo/resources.
The game series Serious Sam is notorious for it. I've been screwing around with for the last few days Serious Sam 3 BFE and oh my god fuck this game on the last stage. You have these long canyons that are connected you go in and each few moments or so you walk, BOOM you have a fight that teleports in. The game is known for being DOOM like but with a lot of targets that come in waves or just keep popping up, it's expected. The last stage though they still do that, but the tonnage of enemies they throw at you really will out do the amount of ammo you have towards the back end before the boss. There's these huge walking horned dumptrucks like the barons in DOOM and only C4 or the cannon will take it down, and they throw so much of them at you with not much cover in the canyon you end up running out of ammo and being lit up like a torch. I'm fed up with it.
I pretty much refuse to buy anything EA these days...I did splurge for Dragon Age: Inquisition on PS4, but that was simply because I was starving for an RPG...
After what they did to myself and my fellow Wii-U compatriots, I can never forgive.
ZP3 pretty much the same here, that was the final straw. I was considering Dragon Age, but again that would be giving them money so it's not happening. I can find just as nice stuff they didn't make on PC or PS4 still.
Speaking of Dragon Age, I don't think I've ever been as angry as when I found the NPC DLC Salesman in Dragon Age Origins.
Early in the game, some guy asked me to do a quest to save his family's tower, I accepted the quest, then the Xbox Live Marketplace purchase content window popped up, asking for $9.99.
I shut the game off and never played it again.
Wow I've never heard of something like that before. That's totally scummy, a new low I haven't heard of before in a console game. You get a thing that's in no way branded as 'extra' and you bother wanting to do a quest and then it asks for ten bucks. That's awful. I would have never played it again either. You really have to draw the line somewhere. I get it on mobile the games are like free or a dollar or two, and they do lay out the DLC charges everywhere clearly between the download site it came from to boxes in the menus of the game. But to do that on a full price console game and bump into like a standard event to panhandle goes too far.
Penny Arcade did a comic on Dragon Age Origins
I should add I bought the game the month it came out on sale at Best Buy, before any DLC announcements or major title updates. In other words, the game shipped with an in-game DLC Salesman.
You know one thing has been very clear I've noticed with EA games, the big ones that are franchises or franchises to be, they all end up getting game of the year editions like a year after the fact and they have a $20 price reduction and include all the DLC within the disc itself. It's a shame so many people don't catch onto that or are so damned impatient they just have to get online and lengthen their e-peen with instant gratification combat. I say stick to the screwballs whoever they are and wait, then you win. EA does it (Dragon Age, Mass Effect), Sony does it (Uncharted, Little Big Planet), Microsoft with Halo among things. Lots of the big name titles bake the gamer on purpose. So unless you really don't give a damn about DLC at all and it's a franchise where they don't gimp the game for it (Little Big Planet and Uncharted) it's not a problem. But when you get into EA pulling the crap they do with Dragon Age and Mass Effect for instance, that's a problem, and a really big problem for Tiger woods fans who buy less than half a game for $60 to buy the rest for over twice the cost.