Badly conceived or implemented elements of otherwise great games

[Bryan_Ekers]

Heck, I remember going “Armageddon” in a game of Civ 1, just raining down nukes on everybody. Pretty soon all land reverted to swamp and though I controlled the world, all I had was fifty of so starving cities surrounded by pollution. There was only one city, a coastal, that had access to two fish zones so they could support one settler. Trying to clean up the swamp was useless - “global warming” would just reswamp it. So my lonely settler had to clean up one pollution zone at a time to reduce the frequency of global warming, letting me clear the swamp and build more settlers, to reduce more pollution, to clear more swamp, to build more settlers…

800 game years later, the world was anew.

Five real years later, Civ II came out, with a feature that let you automate the settlers/engineers. Yeah, thanks, Sid. Thanks a bunch.

[iamthewalrus_3]

This may not quite apply, but I’m listing it anyway. I think the entire premise of Alpha Centauri made for a confusing and disheartening game.

I’ve heard from many people that, as a big fan of Civ II, I’ll love Alpha Centauri, which is very similar, but better.

I can’t get over the complete alienness of it all. I suppose it was kind of a cool idea to set things in an alien and futuristic environment, but the effect was to remove all the intuitive information from the game.

Playing Civilization for the first time, there are lots of choices to make, but a basic knowledge of history will guide you. When faced with the choice of whether to build a warrior or a granary, or whether to research navigation or the wheel, you can guess at the likely uses of those units and technologies.

Playing SMAC, I was constantly faced with choices between Advanced Tensile Psionics, Neurotransmission Regulators, and Graviton Disfluxipators. I would build units, and they’d wander around for a while, doing equally mysterious keyworded activities until they’d gotten themselves killed or assimilated, or until the ground changed from a sort of purple into a brownish green, and then I’d build some more units. I had no idea what I was working towards, or if I was remotely doing anything right. I found myself spending far more time reading the Civilopedia than I was playing the game, and gave it up.

[RickJay]

@Liberal

Four? Damn, I usually had thirty or more on the task.

No kidding. Four workers wouldn’t have possibly kept up. Two dozen was the minimum for a reasonably large empire.

[Bryan_Ekers]

@iamthewalrus(:3=

Playing SMAC, I was constantly faced with choices between Advanced Tensile Psionics, Neurotransmission Regulators, and Graviton Disfluxipators.

Yeah, that was annoying, you had no clue what these things were, making the scientific advance tree just an arbitrary mechanical process.

I thought the “Monopole Magnets” were kinda nifty, though.

[Peaceblossom]

I feel like such a kid for mentioning Kingdom Hearts II, but that minigame in Atlantica. . . ‘Swim This Way’? Stupidest. Game. EVER. ‘Swim this way, we’ll dance and we’ll play, a musical for everyone to have a lot of finny fun!’ haunts my dreams. My sister refers to it as ‘The Finny Fun Song’ and sings it at me when she’s up too late. Plus it’s just annoying to do, pressing the button at exactly the right moment so that MerboySora . . . spews out bubbles? From the Keyblade? in time with the music? Grrrrrrrrr. . . .

[Least_Original_User_Name_Ever]

@Sage Rat

Halo for the X-Box was pretty busted.

There was an assortment of weapons with different traits that made any one uber or useless depending on the field and quarters. Knowing when each weapon came into play and what tactics to use for each one was a blast.

Until we figured out that the pistol had:

1. The same accuracy over distance as a sniper rifle
2. No delay between shots
3. Was a single-shot kill if you hit someones head

Outside of the off chance of bouncing a grenade around a corner, it became entirely a twitch game. Without getting a group of twitch-masters, tactics were toast. Teh laimo.

The pistol was a 4 shot kill, and the sniper rifle was still king, although the pistol was WAY overpowred.

Halo 1 is still playable and getting that 4 shot kill isn’t easy to do.

[Least_Original_User_Name_Ever]

@Trunk

I’m not much of a gamer. I’ve recently played SimCity for the first time, though, so the OP made me think about this:

Water.

Everything needs water, right. . .commercial, residential, industrial, power plants. But, you can’t jack up your “public works” budget so that it’s out of your hands.

Road design is one thing. The design of your roads directly influences how your people populate and use the areas.

But, water? Everyone needs water, and laying pipe is cheap, so it’s just a matter of laying enough pipe so that everyone gets water. It’s not a challenge. You can’t “overwater” people. The “underground” view is sometimes too dissimilar from the above ground view so that you think you watered everyone, but invariably someone doesn’t have water.

You get a message that people don’t have water, but it doesn’t say where, and you need to figure out how to read the overlay maps, or just look at each zone individually, or wait for some zone to fall into disrepair, so you can query it and see “Reason for lack of development: no water”.

It’s just this huge variable that you’re always dealing with that just distracts you from really planning and growing your cities.

Power is MUCH simpler to deal with.

Which Sim City?

[asterion]

@Least Original User Name Ever

Which Sim City?

It’d have to be Sim City 2000 or later as Sim City Classic (and the only version I really like) didn’t have a water system.

[treis]

ESPN Football 2k5 (I think it was that year), three things:

(1) You got maybe 15-20 chances to scout players for the draft. If you scouted a player once you got very little information, twice you got more, all the way up to his ratings if you scouted 4 times. Considering that you are making 7 picks, this just simply isn’t enough scouting chances.

(2) This one is really stupid. There was no ranking of the prospects in the screen you were drafting or scouting. That means you would have to go back and forth between two screens all the time to scout/draft. I’d end up editingthe names of prospects I was interested, so my team ended up being a bunch of guys like Smithaaaa after a few years.

(3) There was no concept of momentum in pass coverage. If you had two guys running in routes with one 15 yards deeper, and you passed to the deep guy, the defender covering the short guy would turn immediately as you threw the ball. He would change his direction 90 degrees in one step. I threw so many damn interceptions because of this.

[appleciders]

BattleZone II had a truly amazing concept for multiplayer play- one player is the commander, who runs the game as an RTS, and the other players (and the commander, if he wants to leave the command vehicle) are the pilots of the units the commander builds. No stupid computer AI- your buddies are flying the ships, and you can just yell what you want them to do. Truly brilliant. Backed up with an unreliable interface and wingman and resourcing AI that was mind-numbingly moronic. The stupid things wouldn’t take your commands; they’d act confused and walk in circles.

[Aunt_Flow]

@Peaceblossom

I feel like such a kid for mentioning Kingdom Hearts II, but that minigame in Atlantica. . . ‘Swim This Way’? Stupidest. Game. EVER. ‘Swim this way, we’ll dance and we’ll play, a musical for everyone to have a lot of finny fun!’ haunts my dreams. My sister refers to it as ‘The Finny Fun Song’ and sings it at me when she’s up too late. Plus it’s just annoying to do, pressing the button at exactly the right moment so that MerboySora . . . spews out bubbles? From the Keyblade? in time with the music? Grrrrrrrrr. . . .

I looooooved that Minigame. I can play it for hours. Why? Because I love rhythm based games. Remember the old Bust a Groove games for the PS1? Hours and HOURS of gameplay for me. I don’t care how many times I beat the damn thing, I still can’t get enough of it. wants Elite Beat Agents SO bad XD

[Tristan]

@Sage Rat

Halo for the X-Box was pretty busted.

There was an assortment of weapons with different traits that made any one uber or useless depending on the field and quarters. Knowing when each weapon came into play and what tactics to use for each one was a blast.

Until we figured out that the pistol had:

1. The same accuracy over distance as a sniper rifle
2. No delay between shots
3. Was a single-shot kill if you hit someones head

Outside of the off chance of bouncing a grenade around a corner, it became entirely a twitch game. Without getting a group of twitch-masters, tactics were toast. Teh laimo.

Then you played with the wrong people… hehehhe…

To this day, when playing HALO with my friends, the cry “Tristan’s got the rocket!” scares the hell out of them. That’s what you call a precision weapon! Near, far, REALLY far… I will get you.

Tristan-- the Rocket King, at least at his house.

[Sage_Rat]

@Least Original User Name Ever

The pistol was a 4 shot kill, and the sniper rifle was still king, although the pistol was WAY overpowred.

Maybe on PC, but on the X-Box it was a one shot kill if you hit the head. Twitch players can successfully get the head shot every time, even if:

1. You’re far enough away that your head is only a single pixel on your opponents screen.
2. You’re running in zig zags.
3. You’re ducking in and out of columns.
4. 1-3 are all true.

Believe me. Our entire office went from playing for an hour every day to playing zilch over the course of a week when one of the guys we hired from digipen figured out that it was a one-shot. The game was over for us all.

[Dinaroozie]

Well, it’s not really a mechanical thing, but Planescape: Torment was very nearly ruined for me because of the ludicrous scantily-clad-ness of basically every female in the game. It was bad even by video game standards. Besides that, it was one of the most mature games around, but the softcore porn lurking around every corner made it hard for me to tolerate. I’ve never really known what caused the disconnect between the artists and the writers for that one. The advertising department, possibly?

Another one: I’ve never really gotten into Final Fantasy, but a non-gamer (or, less of a gamer than me at least) friend of mine once asked me to give them a hand with something in Final Fantasy X. It seems that in order to get some ultimate weapon, you’re required to win in some chocobo race minigame - does that sound right? I can’t remember playing a more ridiculous and obnoxious thing. I suspect I just stumbled across the worst possible part of any Final Fantasy game, because they seem to be well-loved, but seriously, that section was just beyond the pale. Any FF fans know what I’m talking about?

[Sage_Rat]

And no, I truly am not exagerating. I’ll look to see if I can find a video on YouTube or something.

[Richard_Pearse]

Far Cry on the Xbox 360 has essentially been ruined for me because the aiming is completely fucked. I appreciate that a mouse/keyboard combo is easier to use than a console controller for most gamers, but most FPS games manage to make aiming/looking feel right. Not Far Cry though. If you move the thumbstick a little bit, nothing happens, move it a bit more, still nothing, move it a bit more again and you move your view at a reasonable rate.

Seems ok when you’re just moving around the place. The problems occur when you get into a bit of a firefight. You see, if you move the stick a bit further than the halfway across, even if very briefly, the movement rate accelerates astronomically, so that you only want to move through about 20° but you end up moving through 90°. If you don’t move the stick enough, then there’s no movement, or very slow movement.

It means that you have to play the game very stealthily, which is ok, but gets old fast, and if you ever need to use some reflexes, it’s just incredibly frustrating.

[Trunk]

@Least Original User Name Ever

Which Sim City?

Sim City 3000.

The hints say that if you put pipes under the roads, you can water your areas effectively, but still. . .all that means is that everytime you build a road, you need to go back over the exact same area with pipes.

And, it’s never obvious how much water an area is going to use. You might put up 3 water towers (which, for starters, is unsightly) and then realize later on that the people are using more.

So, now, if you didn’t plan for more room where your other towers are, you need to demolish 4 squares to put up a new tower, and usually that means pausing the game so the little pecker heads don’t throw something up so quickly that you need to demolish it again.

At worst, they still don’t get enough water. And you need to do it again.

At best, you’ve ruined the aesthetics of your nice residential or commercial area.

[Cyberhwk]

GTA:SA: Just about every “escort [Person X] to [Place Y].” Inevitably you’d take them to the place you need to go, protect them from a hail of gunfire, achieve your goal, make your daring escape…then fail the mission when your car explodes because you accidentally rear ended some SUV two blocks from your safe house.

[Ethilrist]

@Dinaroozie

Well, it’s not really a mechanical thing, but Planescape: Torment was very nearly ruined for me because of the ludicrous scantily-clad-ness of basically every female in the game. It was bad even by video game standards. Besides that, it was one of the most mature games around, but the softcore porn lurking around every corner made it hard for me to tolerate.

: blink blink :

I may have to install that game after all…

[Grossbottom]

@Dinaroozie

Besides that, it was one of the most mature games around, but the softcore porn lurking around every corner made it hard for me to tolerate. I’ve never really known what caused the disconnect between the artists and the writers for that one. The advertising department, possibly?

For the most part Black Isle Studios was a bunch of twenty-something guys including the head writer on PS:T, Chris Avellone. I’m guessing the boobs met with full editorial approval. IIRC he also wrote the Vegas part of Fallout 2, where you can an earn extra cash by becoming a fluffer in a post-apocalyptic porn studio.