In Prince of Persia 3, the darn chariot race nearly put me off finishing the game. The game also has set save points, and after one helluva long level they put a chariot race BEFORE the save point. Which required you to keep going without touching stuff about 15 minutes. Where your chariot explodes (with no chance of repair in between) if you touch stuff three times. And the chariot does not really respond to your steering efforts. I had my PS2 running for a week straight as I did not want to complete the previous level again, and completed it through sheer luck when I was just about to give up.
That game also had the one sequence where you could not skip the movie before the fight and you had to watch it OVER AND OVER AGAIN when you failed. Did not help that the fight had a fun level equal to the chariot race and basically required some luck to stand in the right place at the right time or be killed. [in-game reference]Speed Kills! Nyah! Hate![/in-game reference]
In X-Wing, your wingmen were about as useful as a bucket of warm spit. As you progressed through the game, if they survived, they got some experience and became better pilots. Still useless. If you bought one of the expansion packs, it came with a Top Ace wingman file that you could copy (and then, the fun became the naming of all your wingmen; “Fnorky” was my favorite). Still useless, by the game designers own admission: they said that the Top Ace pilots could usually be counted on to take out the occasional TIE bomber. Which is a good thing, I guess, because the TIE bomber was one of the mission-killers, along with the shuttles and transports that would show up and fire torpedoes at the ship you were trying to protect, and blow it out of the sky before you even knew they were there. Anyway. The TIE bomber was the slowest ship in the Imperial fleet, had no shields, almost no armor, and it flew in a straight line towards its target, and the TOP ACE pilot could only be counted on to blow one out of the sky “occasionally?”
I adopted the strategy suggested on one website: at the beginning of each mission, send all your wingmen home so they didn’t get in your way, and kill everything all by yourself.
I don’t remember Torment having quite so much exposed skin, but it’s been a while.
X-Men Legends, I’m finally getting around to finishing, and there are two problems :
Loooooooooooooooong missions. Sometimes two in a row without a chance to pop back to the Mansion.
Some areas which, as far as I can tell, are completely inaccessible. Solid, non-breakable walls all around. And yet, I can see stuff inside. Frustrating!
The star mates in the old mechwarrior 2 were equally useless as they never pushed their heat at all. I finally solved the problem by making custom mechs for my star mates, usually massive missle platforms with only a couple laser weapons.
Autocannons were worthless because they would burn all their ammo in the first engagement.
Here is one for the OP and one counter to the OP in the Same game.
EA Hockey 1997 for the PC:
They upgraded the graphics and the motion. But they couldn’t get the Defensive AI up to the smoothness. They figured that out before they let it ship, so they just made every goalie a Golden God. If you knew what they were doing you could get 50+ breakaways in a 5 minute per period game. After one full game(60 minutes, 20 minute periods) in which I had 517 shots on goal with one goal I finally figured out that if you make a pass to the opposing goalie you have a 2% chance that he will miss the pass and you will score, but if you shoot you have less then a .5% chance against any goalie.
One time I had Fedorov, Yzerman, and Kozlov all in the crease trying to put it in, and the Goalie(I think Richter) blocked 15 shots while he was lying outside the crease poking his stick in to block every one.
Blanking on the name of the game, but it was a military helicopter sim, where I wound up having to shoot down my own wingman at the start of every mission. Stupid thing would line up behind me so as not to get in my way when I started shooting, then he’d notice someone directly in front of me and open up with his cannon. Mind-numbing.
Have you tried using Nightcrawler to bamf in there? I ended up taking him on every mission, since you could solve pretty much every power-needing problem (except the longer flight ones and actually getting *rid * of fire) with just him.
I was replaying Betrayal at Krondor recently (a fantasy RPG from the early 90s released as freeware by the company). It’s pretty fun in many ways, but my got, the inventory system. You have a very limited amount of stuff you can carry. You have to carry various tools to repair the stuff you carry. Shops in the game only purchase certain items–you can’t sell armor at the archery store, for example. And there’s no way, short of keeping a detailed paper record, to know where the shops are that will buy the gear you have: most towns have one or two shops,a nd most of those sell things like food, not things like armor or weapons. I spent about five times as much time trying to track down where I could sell loot to get much-needed cash as I spent doing the fun parts of the game.
I’m so happy that RPG designers have realized that realism is NOT a good game-design principle. Give me the jeweler who buys leather armor any day!
Hm. It’s not Sim City 4, because they’ve done a good job of showing the water in the underground mode. Additionally, you dont’ even NEED water in your city for a while. You can hit a plateau before you make that jump and settle some of your finances.
Never played Halo on PC. You might have had shields off? A headshot with no shields will kill you, that’s for certain.
I’ve played some Halo and Halo 2. It doesn’t take one shot to the head to kill you with the pistol. The auto-aim was a little strong on the original pistol, but that’s another video game argument.
Ooh. Been many moons since I played this one. I remember the “no water” zots and how much of a pain they’d get to be. I feel your pain, though. They do simplify the system in Sim City 4, if that’s any consolation.
Likewise. At least, not a whole lot more compared to other RPGs of the time. Compared to the current game market? It’s like watching the “Mrs. Riyadh” beauty pageant.
The Supergoalie Syndrome has plagued many a hockey game where the designers
couldn’t figure out how/couldn’t be bothered to design decent defenseman
algorithms. To be fair playing D at the level of the NHL is certainly an intricate
and often-subtle art, but these Supergoalies certainly get under your skin after
awhile. I heard EA has improved this somewhat but I dunno because I’m not
ever going to buy another sports game from them.
I’m a girl but I never had Planescape come across to me that way. I loved that game.
As for FF, yes, you came across one of the worst moments in that game. Since you say it was for the ultimate weapon, it was FF X, and indeed, you have to get a score of 0.0 (IIRC) in the racing game. I never accomplished it. Barring that, that is one of the sweetest and mature stories in a FF ever, with a character you can really like a wonderfully dear female lead.
My entry can beat the socks out of all of you. ANy of you games remember Wasteland? Well, the deal with Wasteland was you had a party of…I think 4. Doesn’t matter. Each person had x amounts of slots for inventory and that was it. The really bizarre thing was, even if a party member died, you could still keep him in your party AND USE HIS INVENTORY SLOTS. That’s right, it was apparently easier to tow around a dead body and keep his pockets full rather than carrying an extra backpack or something. Sheesh!
The “Super Goalie” tactic doesn’t just apply to Hockey games, and is, in my opinion, the ultimate poorly conceived element in any great game.
For example, how many fighting games default to giving unfairly boosted stats and capabilities (often ridiculously so) to the bosses at the end, rather than devising ways to have a better scaling-difficulty for the AI? my recent example of this is “boss-mode” I-no as I was re-playing Guilty-Gear (-XX Reloaded for Xbox) the other day.
Or how about real-time strategy games where the enemy is often exempt from tech tree limitations, unit caps, and other requirements (such as Dawn of Wars’ PC-enemies not needing to have a relic to access those oh-so-uber units) in order to make them sufficiently difficult?
Basically, the reason we still have fairly limited AI in games is because programmers keep taking the easy way(s) out rather than solving the real problem. That’s why I’m really psyched by last E3’s BioShock presentation, even though I have no real interest in the game itself; complex, dynamic AI interaction and adaptability? About time.
Baldur’s Gate did it the opposite way. If a character died, he dropped all his gear, and you had to portion it out among the rest of your party. (Good luck with that if you’ve just reached the end of a long dungeon crawl!) Even if you raised him on the spot, you still had to gather it all up and re-equip him. Apparently, death makes all your clothes instantly fall off. Just as unrealistic as Wasteland, but ten times as annoying.
Hmm…Lots of complaints about the chocobo racing in FFX: Did no one have the problem with the Lightning dodging minigame? That drove me mad (got up to 183 dodges and my flatmate’s sister walked in front of the screen. And didn’t understand why I swore.)