Game Breakers 130
1up is running a feature looking at some not-so-fun design decisions that have been made in games over the years. "Innovations" like pits, spawn points, and long FMV sequences are just some of the choices they take to task here. From the article: "Rumor has it that videogames are not, in fact, movies. This might seem obvious to anyone who plays them, but the entertainment industry — and even a few game designers — have yet to comprehend this. Developers like Metal Gear's Hideo Kojima insist on cramming their games with cut-scenes that are often inscrutable, occasionally entertaining, and almost never interactive. Sometimes, you can't even press the Start button to skip them."
Yerp. Figure it Out, Already. (Score:2)
While I am not a huge fan of "spawn p
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At any rate, I wouldn't use Metroid Prime as an example of insufficient spawn/save points. I'd go more with something like Zelda: Majora
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However, if you want to talk about save points being few and far between, always point to Turok 2. That game was fucking ridiculous like that.
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A game loses significant amounts of challenge and enjoyability if you can
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Is there anything wrong with letting players play the game at their own level even if it does mean spoiling the gameplay experience? Can't we stop with all
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Inherintly, no. But like I said. I think the feel of a game like Metroid Prime required you to have long periods between saves. It has a lot to do with the energy recharge, but it really adds suspence to a game where you're on your own, no way out, and what you've got is what you've got. Basically, 'You're on your own, please don't die.' Metroid and Turok can be put in th
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Oh? I got two game series that say otherwise: System Shock and Thief. If there's any games that really took the whole "you're on your own, no way out, and what you've got is what you've got" and ran with it, it's System Shock 1 and 2. Thief does it to a deg
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Another save system I've been fond of (and extremely frusterated wi
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Mind you, I'm running just the CDSHOCK.EXE and not !START.EXE. The mouse cursor is a little slow but it works great. If you have issues, try both. More trouble? Check the thread.
Can't say I understand the Fire Emblem saves (never played). You get a main save at the start/end of each chapter and, basically, a save anywhere so long as you quit which, upon loading, gets wiped? Sounds like it
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Okay, Fire Embelem: The way it works is you can save the game in-between combat. At any time you can choose to restart a chapter (each fight). This allows you to go back and buy weapons/items if you had problems in a fight or get different charecters (you can have 30+ chars, but only bring 8-14 into any fight, once a charecter dies, it's gone forever unless you restart the chapter or the game). It helps to know that this is a turn based strategy.
On the GBA the game saves EVERY MOVE
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Re:Yerp. Figure it Out, Already. (Score:4, Interesting)
One example is early in EP1. As you approach a T intersection from the south, they have a lone soldier firing at you far off to the right. You can easily pick him off, but then your attention is forced to the right side hallway and a realtime event: a gunship in its final throes, banging into the walls and crashing before exploding. Bam, there's your cutscene, entirely done without even removing control from the player.
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You didn't get the memo?
Someone forward him the memo.
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Or, you could stop to actually read my comment and realize I said 'old school game' and was, in fact, not referencing the PS2 as 'old school'.
Is it too much to ask you actually read what I type before you flame?
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You're new around these parts, ain't ya?
I'd rather light a candle than complain about the dark.
Yeah, you're a gringo. Well, welcome to Slashdot.
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Yeah. I never beat Battletoads either...
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Yeah, it can be abused but it's such a chore saving every 2-5 minutes and saving to multiple slots just in case you've worked yourself into a that's impossible to get out of. I don't know about you but I have trouble with this save system because I'll load a game, play for an hour, DIE, and realize I haven't save my progress at all.
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Not so sure about that. Remember the old Larry games? Ok, they were adventures and not FPSs - but one thing that was great about them was that it was very, very hard to get a GAME OVER result. If you made a Big And Horrible Mistake, you were ridiculed, punched and abused - and put back in the game about where you left off, so you could continue and try again.
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Nothing compared to the Secret of Monkey Island where there's only *one* way to die in the whole game, and it's very obscure (bonus points for guessing it). T
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Wing Commander 3... (Score:1)
Another good example is Dark Forces: Jedi Knight.
I get that hiring actors, filming, putting it onto removable media is expensive, difficult and time consuming. But it really adds to the game, and if you are going to be spending money on a high end game, you should make it so the cut-scenes flow well with the gameplay and if you are going to have a lot of cinematics, make them interesting and interactive. Make sure you get the player interest
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Of course, the other part was the horrible scripted missions. I sat on that last mission for like a half hour, destroying wave after wave of Kilrathi ships, before I finally got the point that you had to let your wingmen die to continue. Like, WTF?
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Aliens versus Predator (Score:2)
In the "Gold" edition the programmers got to indulge their vanity and re-record the in-game FMVs themselves. An excellent example of why you should hire actors to do acti
what is up with Elder Scrolls III??? (Score:2)
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PS: if you wanna get rid of intellitext, get firefox and get adblocker plus
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Of course then they went and created a messed up leveling/skill system.
"Hey, that's funny, every time i level, so does every other creature/person in the world. What is the point of leveling again?"
I must say that is quite strange to dread the next character level... I give 'em points for being different, if nothing
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I gave up about half way though. The game seemed very uniform and homogeneous. There was little sense that there were places/quests that I should absolutely avoid until I got a better character. But maybe that is what they were
Oblivion is both shallow and deep... (Score:2)
Deep and shallow at the same time.
Starting to play it, you get that 'wow' effect as you see the graphics and what, at first, seems to be awesome gameplay. Then it starts to dawn on you that the graphics are pure bling and the game has nothing more to offer than bling.
For me it was sneaking through the forest and coming across a band of brigands up to no good.
They hadn't noticed me and were engaged in the sort of conversation that you get... what I realised
was that these g
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I restarted my character because by level 20, my character couldn't keep up with the "scaled" enemies. People told me the "tricks," and insisted I should be able to pull-off 4-5 skill-points per category each level-up. I had been averaging three, so I said what the hell.
So I'm looking to level, and I sleep, and the level is 4 Int, 4 Wis and 2 Str. I figure with some work I can bump up the Str to 3, and the Int or Wis to 5, so I reload t
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On the Topic of Not-So-Fun Design (Score:5, Insightful)
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They also failed to mention the bad design decision of having "urban themed" games. Gah! What is wrong with people? Sure the science fiction and the fantasy and some other genres are cliched and all, but at least your fighting for a worthy cause (save the world/princess or something). But these gangster
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Oh, yeah, I use Opera.
And I have a script that removes a ton of advertising elements automagically.
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I'd never have noticed that, seeing how all these damn pop-ups, ads, etc are all quietly eaten by my Adblock config...
too much "innovation" (Score:2)
Yes, games would be so much easier without pits, walls, terrain obstacles, bad guys, and ammo limits. Oh, and they should ship them with godmode defaulted to "on".
FPS Games Fail A LOT (Score:2, Interesting)
This article has touched a sore spot for me, so I'll post an article I wrote a while back that discusses this very issue, but focuses mainly on First Person Shooters. Unfortunately, it's just as applicable as when I first wrote it...
I'm a fan of good first person shooters, rare as they may be. One of my favorite video game pastimes right now is playing James Bond: Nightfire for the GameCube. I just set myself up in multiplayer mode with six bots (all Snow Guards) on the Skyrail level and blast away in 'p
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I like your points, except since I'm working on a huge mod to an existing game (Land of the Dead), something definitely to point out, is that building 20 to 30 to 40 high-quality weapons, models, animations, textures, would take a few people working full time several weeks, if they are experts in the field. For me and the 2 other people on my team, doing something like that would probably take years, considering we have other things to do wi
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Despite it's weaknesses, there's a reason Counterstrike alone generates more server traffic than the entire country of Italy.
If you consider yourself a true fan of the the FPS genre, you should worry less about a less than optimal platform and control scheme - consoles, and play FPSs on the PC, where your points ha
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Which PC first-person shooters support split screen on a television, so that I don't have to spend $3,000 on four low-end gaming PCs and four monitors to allow four players to play?
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"Can we start the game yet?"
"No, I've got 6 pages of multiplayer options to set before we're ready."
Justifying some of these decisions (Score:2)
And just stand there while the other human players shoot him, right?
Of course it's an option to drop the weapon. You complain about lack of fixed gun emplacements, but then you complain that the heavy guns are sl
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So if the weight of a gun is an option, then should the type of ammo consumed, firing rate, number of bullets per clip, damage per bullet, and ability to dual-wield also be an option for each gun?
In markets that allow game rental (such as the United States), some publishers have tried to extract income from renters by selling personalized unlock
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Your complaining about games in excruciating detail, and yet your not using a mouse and keyboard to play FPS?!?!
Its like spending fifty grand, or at least putting the thought in to spend it, to pimp out your 1987 ford festiva. When you have such a basic problem (owning a ford festiva - playing fps on a gamecube), don't you think you should solve that before dealing with the other issues?
In other words, pick
Sorry, no. (Score:2)
You're talking about a game which implements every single thing you like about every single game that exists, and then saying "That's a good game, a great game is that and more."
Sorry, no. Spend five years implementing ridiculous customizable options, 20 DIFFERENT weapons (as a "bare minimum"), and all of your other demands? I'd rather have them spend f
Guild Wars and HL2 (Score:1)
Guild Wars does a nice job on the "Skip>>>" button, but everyone in your party has to hit it in order to skip. The scenes are important to the plot and just plain beautiful. An addition to that with NightFall is that characters' mouths move. Alas, they are cinematic and not intereac
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I tried doing this in Dark Messiah of Might and Magic but you lose the game if you hurl things at your "friends".
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what things should be done... (Score:2)
I've already virtually eliminated the HUD, it only shows things briefly when they change, unless you hit a button to bring it up, except for ammo holdings, which since we're using realistic weaponry, I really haven't come up with any other way (we could make that disappear too if you haven't fired in a while, but I see that leading to a lot more complaints).
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Just one right of the top of my head: Know when to stop with the realism.
Yes, in real life I have no crosshairs, and in real life I have no ammo counter. But in the reality of your storyline, I'm not a computer dude sitting at his desk with things on his mind, either - I'm a trained special forces whatever. My 10-year sniper veteran character doesn't need a crosshair, I 2-hours game-experience player do.
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Someone has been making modified weapons for the game that have no crosshair but have you staring down the barrel of the weapon, which also drives me freaking nuts. And more so that the weapons move along with your moving animations.
My thought is to leave the weapons in the normal FPS position, while making crosshairs that are individual for each weapon, although I really haven't made any progress in this since developing the first crosshair for our ro
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The thing that annoys me by far the most with virtually every FPS is the total lack of body simulation. In FPS you are for most part a pair of flying arms that control like a cylinder on ice, not exactly the thing I expect when I want to control a human. So give the player a body, use the arms when climbing a ladder and don't climb 'free-hand' like in HL2, let that body have hit-
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Watch others play (Score:1)
When you have a playtester, watch them play, but don't teach them, answer questions, or comment on what they do. Let them struggle their way through the game like a player would if they bought the game. While they play, take notes on what they do. Do they appear confu
You need CRATES - LOTS OF THEM!!! (Score:2)
CRATES are proportional to FUN
Yar (Score:2)
What? You don't recall that three-hour Yar's Revenge? It won't, like, seven Oscars, dude.
And in their sequel: (Score:1)
It includes such design decisions as: splitting your content onto 8 seperate pages when one would have one.
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Works really great for those multiple-pages forum discussions as well
Resident Evil 4 (Score:1)
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I've been so trained to pretty much ignore cutscenes, or just turn my brain off as they show some flashy pre-rendered crap, that I died at least once on nearly every cutscene in RE4. You actually have to pay attention in this one!
Then again, I've pretty much always hated cutscenes. They're supposed to advance the plot and add some sort of "story" to the game, but they end up being the literary equivalent of Dick and Jane. "Your mission is to shoot the aliens. The
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Granted, a whole game of instant death via this manner would b
fact (Score:2)
What was the change? In Incubation, you could always react to the enemies and single mistakes, while painful
Hey asshole (Score:1, Flamebait)
Hey asshole, how about you go buy games that don't have cutscenes. There's enough to go around. I hear Lumines is pretty cool.
Anyone who picked up a Metal Gear game in the last decade and was surprised to find lots of lengthy cutscenes, obviously doesn't know very much a
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In a story-heavy game, you need cutscenes. I for one would find it difficult to concentrate on a level boss' monologue if I have to worry about getting killed at the same time. If you push it far enough it actually becomes its own genre, and I for one really liked many of the
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The first time you play the game the cut scenes are needed for the telling of the story. This adds to the games immersiveness and that adds to the games value... but if you find yourself playing a game because the gameplay is that good having to deal with the same 5-10 minute cutscene over and over again can be fairly tedious.
Take Undy
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Time Killers! (Score:1)
List (Score:2)
1. In-game ads that detract from gameplay. Acceptable game for placement: Gran Turismo Unacceptable: City of Heroes
2. Microtransactions. Don't nickle and dime us to death and don't scrape content that should have been in there initially *cough*horsearmorlumines*cough*
3. Grind. See WoW, EQ, and BF2142 as perfect examples of why grind sucks.
4. Limited custimization of control
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City of Heroes? Do you mean the fake company ads, like the law firm that offered to get you money if you got caught in superhero crossfire? Those are mostly jokes, like the game's restaurant name choices (Hero Hoagies and things like that). I'd think those don't detract from gameplay, and if anything add some relevant humor.
NOTE: I haven't played CoH in about 5 months, so if those funny l
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http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/10/19 [penny-arcade.com]
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I've basically given up on all RPGs because of grind.
However, I've come to believe there's a large chunk of people out there who actively enjoy the countless random battles in (for example) Final Fantasy.
I don't mind that there are games for people who like that kind of thing. I can let them get on with it.
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Even I'm mildly annoyed. I'm right handed, but Link isn't. Even in the NES original, while facing in three of four directions he was left handed. And the manual to Zelda II specifically said that he holds the sword in his left hand.
I'd have put up with holding the wiimote in the wrong hand - it's only a matter of training, dammit! - if it meant playing the game the way Din, Farore and Nayru inten
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Cut-scenes themselves are not the problem (Score:1)
Sure, I love cut-scenes and movies in gam
Ph33r the arteest (Score:2)
Two words: (Score:2)
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