I also have had no problems playing the game (at a decent, but not the best, video quality). This is on a computer that’s about six years old, 384MB of PC133(!) RAM, and a bottom of the line 128MB video card upgrade that is about a year and a half old.
My story of woe with Civ4: When I bought the game, I had a catastrophic install error at the end of disc 2. It just crashed. On two different computers. So I take the game into the store (not the same store it was bought at - the game was a gift that came from Best Buy for which there was no longer a receipt, but Target will take an even exchange on a defective product without receipt), get a new copy, and it loads perfectly. So that’s not a problem I blame on the game, just on a defective disc.
I do understand that you’re not the only one to have had problems getting the game to play at all, but if my upgrade-a-box can play it, i wouldn’t necessarily count it as a game flaw. To ask the standard question, as there have been a few patches that fixed some compatibility issues: Are you running the most recent patch? I believe it’s v1.61 that came out mid-April.
Really? Super Metroid had a timed escape at the beginning too (as well as one at the end). Like Metroid Prime, the timed escape at the beginning gives you at least twice as much time as anyone could possibly need–who didn’t put down the controller when the time started to go run errands. Escapes are a classic part of Metroid. Its a shame you missed out on one of the best games for Game Cube over that.
The duping didn’t bother me, you could choose to use it or choose not to. What bugged me were the players (OP didn’t specify it had to be related to the design or a bug). It didn’t take long before EVERYONE on Battle.net were hacking. Being a PK was the only reason worth playing the game after playing through it a couple times. But as soon as hacking came in, EVERYONE was invulnerable. If I just wanted to group with someone and play legit, inevitably a hacked PK would come in and slaughter us. If I wanted to PK, I had an enormous amount of diffulty finding people who didn’t have God-mode on.
Of course, even more obnoxious than hacking was the whole PKK and PKKK… thing: “I’m a PKK, I only kill PKs” and “I’m a PKKK, I only kill PKKs”… seriously, WTF?
When this game came out I was excited about it. I pre-ordered it. I rushed to pick it up. I installed it and… #@*! So slightly frustrated, I installed it on my other computer and ... !@#!
So then I tinkered and fished around the net - read the Civ forums - read the Straight Dope - read various other places AND tried every fix that anybody suggested. And … @#$&! Nothing!
So I uninstalled it and returned it and kept my money. And nothing and noone - not God himself - will ever get me to (a) try to reinstall Civ IV (patches or no patches) or (b) buy another game from 2k and Firaxis.
Why? Because of the frustration I incurred — and because of the “Get it out there, patch it later” mentality that seems to be taking over at gaming companies. I mean, goddammit - they knew it wouldn’t work on a whole slew of graphics cards and they just put it out there. They knew that if it ran it all, it wouldn’t run worth a damn at the suggested minimums. And moreover, there is no reason for all that graphics intensive bullshit on a turn-based game. They can rot in hell, and I shouldn’t have said anything because now I’m mad again about all the crap I went through when I bought Civ IV way back on its release date. Fuck.
Oh — and in my experience, and many others — it was a horrendous problem that prevented the enjoyment of an otherwise great video game.
I mean “trade in to the used game store for store credit.” Though I remember the days of “buy a game, play it for three weeks, get sick of it, and return it for a full refund.”
Wonderfully fun games with great dramatic action until you reach the inevitable “platformer” levels where:
At Normandy you are required to creep forward a foot toward the beach, die randomly, reload, creep 2 feet forward avoiding the insta-death spot, die again, reload, creep 3 feet forward…
Then, after seemingly being done with that nonsense, the game does it to you again on another level. Only this time it’s snipers! Yay, fun! And you have to protect other soldiers from getting sniped as well! Creep forward, die, reload…
Well, mine has the opposite problem of Civ IV… it was a really old game, played in DOS, and probably came out in the mid 1990s if not earlier. It was the great granddaddy of helicopter games. The only colors were black and green. I loved playing that game with my grandfather. The only problem was, once he got a newer computer, we couldn’t play it anymore. The computer was too fast for it.
You know, I do recall the one in Super Metroid now, and I was quite annoyed with it, I’m sure, but as I was playing it whilst a teenager, it would have been inadvisable to just ignore it. And I had fewer options as to how to spend my time.
As an adult, I can do lots of things more fun than Metroid Prime. Elective Root Canal surgery, for instance.
The timed portion is not in any way hard. It can be done on medium with plenty of time to spare.
It is the only timed portion in the game (not even one at the end, IIRC)
You are depriving yourslf of one of the best games ever made for the Gamecube by not playing it.
I know you seem to hate timed portions on principle, but really, there is a time and place to be stubborn, and this is not it. Add to the fact that I still don’t understand why you oppose a small timed portion? Do you hate the original Super Mario Brothers and Super Mario Broters 3? Every level of those is timed. What about a game where you pick up a powerup, but it’s only useable for a short amount of time? Where do you draw the line?
And my contribution to the thread: Civilization: Call to Power. Great concept for a Civ game (go into the future and produce techs and improvements that are right now just theories,) and a, I still beleive, much better way of doing tile improvements, but a clunky interface, and you couldn’t view your cities. Everything had to be down with a hard to navigate menu system at the bottom of the screen. You couldn’t just click on a city and BAM, have everything you need right there, you had to click on it then click on about three other options in the menu just to change the thing being built.
Don’t be silly, bouv. Super Mario Brothers is entirely different. The time limit there is so broad as to be a joke, and most importantly, unlike Metroid, there’s not much at all to explore. I’m a completist. I’m the guy who goes in an RPG or platformer with item collection and gets everything. I don’t want to rush. It’s not fun.
SMB, on the other hand, has no permanent item collection. The most hidden thing you’ll find, apart from a secret warp zone or two, are coins. Whee.
SMB3 is a bit of a middle ground, since you do have item collection, but they’re all disposable, so it ultimately matters little.
I can see where you’re coming from with the whole hating timed game play thing, but seriously: you gave up on one of the best video games ever made after five minutes, over an element of game play that’s never reapeated (so far as I remember) in the rest of the game. If it’s so intolerable to you, have a friend beat it for you. It’s an astoundingly easy to get past it, and there’s nothing during that section that you need to collect in the first place. At least, nothing that you didn’t have ample time to collect before the timed section starts.
I forgot the name, but the reason I rented the game was to get the MGS2 demo. Turns out it had some badass robot fighting action, great controls, and some of the best console graphics of the time. Problem was, it ended up only having like 4 different types of enemies throughout the whole game. Now that I think about it, add the first Devil May Cry to the list for the exact same reason.
War of the worlds. Awesome game when it ran. Normally it crashed constantly. I loved how it was based on the book and not updated for modern times. WW1 style tanks and artillery against tripods. The support message boards were full of people screaming about the crashing problems. Rage refused to patch the game and the tech support people who answered the boards basically said, “We don’t know what the hell you are talking about”. Rage no longer exists so I think there is a small bit of justice in the world. Listen to your consumers or go out of business.
Coupled with it’s infamous no in-game save was the fact that the game was freakin’ unplayably, unenjoyably hard! It wasn’t just another FPS, it was an actual Colonial Marines simulator! Eeeek…
For me, it’s Grand Theft Auto - San Andreas. This could be a good game but the crappy controls totally ruined a fun game. It’s even difficult to set up your controller with your custom settings. It just because too much hassle to play.
I’m a huge fan of Metroid for the Game Cube. But some of the boss battles are just over the top. The one horrendous problem of Metroid games is the final boss battle is way beyond what the game has prepared you for. You go from normal game player to super awesome hardcore 14-year-old game player and it’s just not doable with this old guy’s reflexes. Metroid needs to decide whether it’s a video game, or a hardcore video-gamers’ game. It really sucks you can get all the way to the end, and never hope to finish the end.
I loved the Metroid Prime games to death, but one thing I had a problem with, especially in Metroid Prime 2, was making you refight miniboss battles each time you went in a room. In 1 if you wanted to explore the Chozo Ruins at all later in the game, you had to clear the room of those Chozo ghosts, which was always a nuisance. At least if you were just passing through you could ignore them, and once you had the x-ray visor they were much easier to beat.
In 2 though, many rooms in Torvuus Bog made you refight the teleporting pirates everytime you entered, even if you were just passing through, and they shut off the doors so you had to fight them no matter what. And they took so many hits to kill, it was really irritating to have to fight them seven billion times.
F-15 Strike Eagle 2 for Apple //e: It was a sophisticated flight simulator for the day with a detailed instruction manual that even described various dogfighting maneuvers, jinking and so forth. The problem is that the sky was solid blue and the land was another solid color, and it only drew a few frames a second, so there was no way to properly control it or to know what you were doing.
I loved Low-G-Man for the NES. It was a side scroller that was a bit different because you had a spear for a primary weapon against evil robots. The problem is I could never figure out how to kill the crab boss in the submarine. This was back when Nintendo Power was my only hope for finding tips. Blaster Master was also a favorite and had a similar problem somewhere.
Gran Turismo 3 is an amazing PS2 driving simulator with beautiful graphics, sophisticated physics and tuning, many cars, and great tracks. I got a lot of enjoyment out of it, but I never progressed far. There are tests and rallies I enjoyed, but in the main game you have to accumulate wins, and buy and tune your cars to move forward. For each new series I had to do much tuning and testing to get a car that I could win with, that actually took some skill to win with. There are no default car choices or settings to give a reasonable challenge. A tweak that takes a couple seconds off a lap makes the difference between it being impossible to win and it being ridiculousl easy.
Also, there is no AI or damage, so you can pass by diving to the inside way too fast and bouncing off the other cars. You can actually get through a corner faster that way. Sometimes the computer cars also bounce off you because they don’t think to avoid you.
I haven’t played much video games in a couple years now. I’ve had a lot of other stuff to worry about. I fell like a very old man and I worry if I’ve lost something. I never thought this would happen.
