Not so fast! Some people don’t know when to give up. 
(At least, that’s what I’m hoping for.)
Also: RPG games, why do you all have to be so long and boring? Video games should be like high school sex: get in, get out and move on to the next. 
Okay, since folks are trotting out some older games, I’ll add mine to the list.
X-Com: Apocalypse- The first X-com was brilliant. It had everything I wanted in a game- original premise, atmosphere, easy controls, research, and turn based combat. It also had a great base management system. X-Com 2 was basically the same game with a terrible color scheme and no lasers (dammmit!), but otherwise good.
Enter X-Com 3. This pos started with an interesting premise, but botched it all up. Whoever thought that going ‘retro’ with game design was good (50’s style hovercars, etc.) needs to be castrated. Also, the actual characters during house to house play were TINY, and the interface was terrible. Not to mention that it was less than stable on most PCs I’ve had.
It was ambitious, but it proved to be just a jumble of half-assed ideas with poor execution.
X:Com interceptor. A flight sim? wtf? Okay, I gave this one a chance. It was not bad, even though it ad the same 50’s retro look to the controls. However, the space combat was ridiculous. There was a bug in the joystick controls so that the screen scrolled 10x faster than it was supposed to. Unless you had tracking lasers, you could not hit anything! And guess what? They never offered a patch! They said that one was in the works, but it never happened.
I’ve heard that there is another X-Com game in thw works, but at this point, I give up. Anyone know whether X-Com 1 will work in XP? Know where I can get a copy?
This comic strip I wrote pretty much sums up what I hate about all RPGs. Excuse the foul mouth please.
If you’re really hard up for another Xcom-type game, take a look at UFO: Aftermath. It is not an X-com sequel or clone, but it does derive heavily from the ideas of Xcom. It may or may not be your beverage of choice, but it’s worth a look. My advice is to take a look at a demo or see if you can see a copy of the game in action before you buy it.
Amen. I hate when game studios feel the need to be different for different’s sake. Too often sequels involve some fucked up change to the storyline and gameplay, when all they need to do is update the technology.
If they just updated the technology behind XCOM (nicer graphics, maybe a realtime game with orders issued during pause, whatever), they’d be able to spank one out every few years. Instead, it nosedives after 3. (2, really.) Ditto Ultima. I would play the living shit out of an ‘updated’ U4 or U5. But nope, they felt some god-awful need to get goofy, and now Ultima is nothing but something to be remembered.
Obviously this isn’t to say that change can’t be good. But some games don’t need to be changed so much as they just need some updating.
Dungeon Siege. I understand you (the programmers) have to code for the lowest common denominator in gamer intelligence, which is pretty damn low, so I expect there to be a certain amount of pointing and clicking.
Suppose I want to save and exit the game.
So I point and click to bring up the game menu.
I point and click on “Save.”
I point and click on the game I want to save on top of.
I point and click to confirm that I want to save over the top of it.
I point and click to confirm that I don’t want to change the name, I just want to save the damn game.
This dumps me back into the game.
So I point and click to bring up the game menu.
I point and click on “Exit.”
The game asks me to point and click to confirm that I want to exit without saving.
I… JUST… SAVED!
Well, there’s usually pretty consistent. Only Tactics and VII seem to be radically different. But I get used to it after a couple hours. It is annoying, though.
I think it’s called message speed, or battle speed. In all the games I usually crank them up to fastest or almost fastest. I hate waiting on dialogue.
Yuna just had these unnatural . . . pauses. In . . . every one of her . . . sentences. I don’t remember any particular annoying trait for Tidus. I liked IX, thought the cut-scenes were beautiful, if i bit prominent. X-2 was really fun, and enjoyable. Yeah, you have dress spheres and they have a little cut-scene every time youo change, but you don’t need to change often. They’re more like job classes a la V and Tactics. I generally stuck with one until I learned all teh skills, then manually moved to another in the menu screen.
Brutus, because you deny the grace of Ultima 6 and 7, your heart is dead to all that is good and holy in this world. (Still, though. 5 was pretty cool.)
To the games:
Hearts of Iron: When Rommel with a combined force of panzers and motorized infantry has managed to cross the Atlantic, land on the eastern seaboard, seize Washington, Philadelphia, New York and Boston, and is preparing to strike westward across the nation, maybe the US should consider withdrawing some forces from the European theater. Just sayin’, is all.
Europa 1400 - The Guild: Such promise, only to be destroyed by game-breaking bugs. What’s that, you say? A patch? Hoorah! …only it introduces a different game-breaking bug. What’s that, you say? A patch to the patch? Yippee! …only it introduces another different game-breaking bug. What’s that, you say? A patch to the patch to the patch? Ok, but fool me once, you can’t fool me again, as a wise man once said. Look, no surprise there, the patch breaks something else entirely. But look at it this way! It’s been a year and a half since the game’s release, so it’s time to repackage it with a buggy expansion and the broken patches and sell it as a Gold Edition and swear up and down that everything was fixed!
Whores.
Oh God, yes, Fire Emblem! I went on an extended rant on this to my wife a couple of days ago. I really want to like this game, but there are all these places where poor design decisions just wreck the experience. The perma-death is a big one. I wouldn’t mind it so much if the characters were easily replaceable like in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. But each character is introduced at a very specific point in the plot so if you let anyone die you’re screwed – you just have to play the entire level over again.
Other things about FE that piss me off:
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Each weapon has a fixed number times it can be used before it breaks and there’s no way to repair it. Which means that when I get a cool weapon I’m afraid to use it in case I might need it later.
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You can buy new basic equipment at shops on the battlefield, but since each character can only hold five items, it really limits how much you can stock up. Plus, sometimes the strategic considerations of the battle make it hard to get the character who needs to buy something into the shop.
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The movement ranges are too long compared to the ranged combat ranges. Which means that it’s too hard to set up a wizard as heavy artillery. And when you get really heavy artillery (the ballista) its range is insanely long, making it trivially easy to use.
This game is so close to being good. If they resurrected dead characters after each battle, alowed you to repair your weapons, and gave you a proper purchase/equip screen before each combat it would be addictive as crack.
theckhd and Imran, you might enjoy this comic about Xenosaga.
Agree on MOO3. I read all of the bad reviews. I read all of the reviews saying that it’s a great game once you figure out how to work the interface. After finally figuring out the interface, it became the most expensive coaster I ever bought.
Sim City 4: Oh, how I wanted to like this game… and maybe some day I will, when I have a NASA supercomputer in my apartment. But did they consider how much of a system burden it is to have to zoom in to every fire that breaks out? And why does the mayor have to hand-fight every fire in the city? In New York, the fire department doesn’t drag Bloomberg’s ass out of bed every time somebody’s kitchen fire gets out of control…
Harvest Moon - a Wonderful Life: The ceiling on this is so low, you’ve got the game beat, making money hand over fist by the end of the second year. Then what do you do? There’s no new challenges and nowhere else to go… that’s about it, all you’ve got left to do is buy the milking machine and keep on watering the fuckin’ plants.
Majora’s Mask: Somebody was so in love with their own cleverness that the game is pretty much unplayable without a guide. Granted, we’re used to getting stuff wrong and trying it again. But MM has protracted the Do-Over to an experience about as much fun as being stuck in traffic. Getting some of those masks (especially that damned Couple’s Mask and the ever-fucking Romani Mask) isn’t fun, it’s just stressful. You’ll sometimes spend close to an hour doing a long sequence of chores, and standing around waiting for a task (often just a guessing game) that you probably won’t get right the first time… and if you get it wrong, it’s back to the beginning. Getting in that much trouble for getting it wrong the first time (or the second, or the tenth) is too much like real life. Hope the Zelda due in '05 doesn’t require time travel.
I run it in W2K, so I assume it can be convinced to run in XP as well. Sound is a bit flakey at times.
As far as finding a copy, eBay, maybe? Or some abandonware site perhaps.
I don’t play just FF from Square. I’ve got Parasite Eve, Threads of Fate, Chrono Trigger, Chrono Cross, and Legend of Mana for the PlayStation. I’ve got some others for the SNES, but I haven’t had that console hooked up for YEARS. I wonder if Secret of Mana would still play? I know it has a battery in it, it might be dead.
I found the speed option in the menu, thanks for making me look for it.
Yuna had annoying pauses, but Tidus was a whiny brat. He was too cocky. FFX had some really great features (the grid sphere system might be the best way of obtaining skills I’ve ever seen, and there was no kawaii (sp?) mascot). However, I was unable to win some of the minigames, so I never got some of the ultimate weapons.
One of the gripes I had about FFIX was that it had not one but TWO mascot characters, Vivi and Eiko. I don’t find kids to be particularly cute, and I really don’t like kids in my party. The official strategy guide for FFIX was a real ripoff, too. Most of the hints consisted of a note saying “Go online and enter this code”. Since I buy strategy guides at the same time as I buy the games, and don’t read them until I’m stuck or on the second playthrough, I didn’t notice that the guide was nothing more than Square telling me to go online for my hints. And the stupid online service didn’t work, either. I had to go to Gamefaqs when I was stuck.
I might pick up X-II if I see it for sale at a cheap price. It would have to be under US$20 for me to even think about buying it, though. Before FFIX and FFX, I always bought Square games as soon as they came out, at full price, then watched them fall to under half price within a few months. They have disappointed me too often for me to do that again.
Another that comes to mind…
Return to Krondor: Some sequels live up to the original; some improve; some screw up a couple of features. Granted, it had the magnificent Betrayal at Krondor to live up to, but this was a miserable failure of a game in so many ways…
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The difficulty. The majority of the battles were easy. The hard battles depended on purely random factors more than on tactics. Once you had the plate-wearing characters there was virtually no challenge in the game.
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Game mechanics. Spells no longer drained the caster’s health. Inventory space became purely weight-dependent and no longer accounted for realistic space or common sense. Equipping the party was a question of doing dozens of random encounters praying for that piece of dragonhide armor or an enchanted dagger.
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Most of the enemies had little to no relevance to the plot.
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Only James was carried over from the original game. Okay, two of the original characters died, and Pug would be overpowering, but was it really too difficult to bring back Locklear from his banishment and tie him into the plot? Or Owyn, for that matter?
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Alchemy - there was no point to it. Any of those same potions could be found or bought for a fraction of the effort.
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Interface - at times, one had to mess with camera angles for ages to find an exit.
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Mostly lackluster boss fights.
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Very limited scope of locations, forcing linear gameplay.
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Substantially worse music than the original (understandable, and not too awful on its own)
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At most a fifth as long as the original.
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Vampires? Swarms of undead within spitting distance from the monastery at Sarth? Goblins a couple of dozen miles away from Krondor? Incredibly inconsistent with Feist’s previous books.
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Conversations without captions. What the hell were they thinking?
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A generic nemesis rather than… (play the original if you don’t know)
Plusses:
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Stunning graphics for its time.
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Mostly good voice acting.
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Excellent layout of the Krondorian sewers.
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Added combat options.
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At most a fifth as long as the original.
Thanks for adding this one. I too, was hugely disappointed with this game. Biggest reasons- camera angles and stupid puzzles that do not require much cleverness (remember the lockchests in part 1? I LOVED those!) but speed with your mouse hand. That’s why I finally gave up -I got stuck on the stupid light bouncing puzzle in the temple at the end.
Also- did you know that Feist wrote 3 novels on the Riftwar legacy? Book 1 was based on BaK, Book 2 was sort of a long segue, and book 3 was RtK, all pretty much word for word/ mission by mission. Book 1 was pretty good…the others stunk. Of course, I guess that’s a reflection on the games, since the books were written after the fact.
Black & White: A god sim with potential, it suddenly decides it wants to be a Tamagotchi. And even that wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t so damn buggy.
System Shock II: the only game I’ve ever seen where your guns require near-constant maintenance so they won’t break. Apparently, weapons in the far future are incredibly finicky things, prone to jamming, breaking, and exploding if not repaired at least once every CLIP! You cannot fire a whole clip of ammo in many cases without breaking your freakin’ gun!
Way Too Many Games: It is frustrating beyond human belief to not be able to proceed because I didn’t do something right four levels ago. Isn’t there some way to avoid this nonsense?
Lots Of Other Games: Jumping puzzles suck, okay? No more jumping puzzles. If you ask me, jumping puzzles is what killed the Tomb Raider franchise, because if you can’t think of any more creative obstacle than a jumping puzzle, you are a bad game programmer and have forgotten the face of your father, okay?
Warcraft II: Pig farms are harder to destroy than stone guard towers. If you really want to block a point of approach, build a row of pig farms across it. Must be razorbacks, huh? Those pigs is TOUGH!
Yet More Games: Okay, there are lots of ways to get through a given point in a game. One of them should not have to be “quicksave and run, then load and try again until you successfully survive by sheer luck.” Again, this is bad game design. It is also tedious, especially when you arrange for a cutscene to be inserted into the situation, so I have to watch it sixty times before I can go on.
Every fucking console third-person hack-n-slash or “survival shooter” made since RE (I’m looking at you, Onimusha): Resident Evil controls suck.
No wait, let me rephrase that. Resident Evil controls suck big huge hairy danglin’ donkey balls covered in Cheez Whiz and topped with a cherry.
Capcom designed the controls for Resident Evil specifically to suck because they were too lazy to think of a better way to make their game harder. In general, if your primary goal in having created something was to maximize how much it sucks, it is considered a bad idea to make that particular thing the basis for every single game in or connected to that genre for the rest of eternity.
Game developers, please take note.
The control system is basically what has frozen me out of that genre of game. That, and I hate camera angles that leave you unable to see most of the room, especially when 1) something is coming at you, and it is clear that your character should be able to see it and b)there s something important to see/get.
I’m not a hardcore gamer. I like games that allow me time to think (turn based games RULE!) and whose controls are, if not simple, intuitive. This leaves me stuck with older games, rpgs, and strategy games. Even though I drool over some of the new concepts out there, I have to control myself because I know that I’ll not really enjoy them.
URU Yes, it’s neat that you managed to squeeze all that game onto one CD. But it isn’t neat when I have to wait forever and a day every time I link. And when the game fires up, it takes a minute more for my avatar to actually move how I want. But the puzzles aren’t as well done as in Exile or in Riven. And the concept of running around just to find those Journey Cloths is a little lame. For future games, lose the Avatar and bring back Altrus.
for those of you ragging on the quality of voice acting in FFX and FFX-2:
Hey, I totally agree with you. The Japanese voice actors were much better, in my opinion. However, that may be because I don’t understand Japanese enough to really judge their performances.
And, alas, the FFX International edition only had room on the disc for one soundtrack, so they went with English.
Then, they put out an “international” edition of FFX-2 which has the English soundtrack, but only Japanese captions and menus…gah.