My last word about horrible video games

The Game Room
61

Ultima IV (Quest of the Avatar) on the NES was definitely a flawed game in many ways, but it was still a great game through those flaws. And I once picked up the “original” PC version from Good Old Games, and it was flawed in completely different ways, mostly amounting to the gameplay being clumsier than the NES version, but the narrative being deeper. Give me the original, but with the NES’s combat mechanics, and it’d be a game for all time.

NES Ultima III, though, seemed to be nothing but the flaws.

62

Like Papyrus, DKW finds difficulty in interesting places.

Subnautica is definitely on the hand-holding end of survival games, but I remember an extensive thread in which DKW insisted it was way too difficult, despite all the advice we could give and playing on an easy mode. It seemed to me that he was conflating difficulty with dislike–as if something bad happened early in the game that startled or upset him, and he took a dislike to it. After that, he seemed to just refuse to engage with the game’s mechanics, leading to more bad things happening and deepening his dislike.

63

Yup. Ultima III is literally the reason I play video games today, so the OP is clearly incorrect. :wink:

Actually, I’m kinda confused by the OP overall. It doesn’t sound like they ever actually liked games. In fact, based on the complaining I’ve seen and their attitude, I think the problem is with them, rather than with the games.

64

Let’s just say the moral choices are what made the Ultima (4?) with the moral choices unplayable for me. I just wanted to kick ass and chew bubblegum.

65

Another gorgeous space game worth playing is Everspace. It’s a really stripped down experience but a lot of fun.

66

Unless you mean “Murder people and laugh” that shouldn’t have been a problem.

If you do mean “murder people and laugh” you’ll forgive me if we don’t have that much sympathy that you can’t live out that particular power fantasy AGAIN.

67

My suspicion is that there was a desire to kill everything for loot and XP, which admittedly is how your normal CRPG works. But Ultima IV requires some restraint at times when you’re trying to advance in the virtue system. I can understand how that might not appeal to everyone but to me that was the appeal of the game, and the reason why it was my favorite Ultima game and one of my favorite NES RPGs…

68

Don’t Joker-shame.

69

All right, apparently this is in the Game Room now, which had me really surprised for a while (I’ve had what I considered to be a much less nasty Cafe Society OP end up in the Pit), and then I saw how many responses there were, which had me totally surprised, and then I saw the responses…and…it’s a mixed bag. And very civil all throughout.

This is a really nice website. :slight_smile:

Anyway, I meant what I said, I’m not going to continue grumbling, it’s not good for you or me. I do feel compelled to address this one point:

I’m not here to denigrate anyone’s choices of electronic entertainment. If you find getting lost, losing ships, staving off mutiny by an eyelash, running out of food, getting stuck like a pincushion in sword fights, getting creamed in naval battles, getting creamed in land battles, getting rebuffed by snobbish governors’ daughters, getting the door slammed in your face by crown-grovelling Spanish merchants, not being able to find the place on the map, having the wind change direction to directly in your face, and retiring as a lowly farm hand for the 500th time fun, more power to you. Your life, your pleasures. I gotta ask, though: If this game really is so wonderful, where are the videos? Any game that players love, that becomes iconic, that’s captivating, visionary, groundbreaking, breathtaking, expansive, controversial, denounced, they will record it. Just think about all the Super Mario Bros. or Grand Theft Auto games you’ve seen in your lifetime, Tecmo Super Bowl, Baba Is You, Street Fighter 2, Dark Souls, Minecraft. The only things I could ever dig up from Pirates! (all NES version) were an incomplete career, a “quick game” challenge (farm hand, natch), and a bizarre TAS that was almost certainly made as a joke. Even The Oregon Trail has a few serious runs. In all, it really seems like that whatever challenge this game may provide, reaching a luxurious retirement…the ultimate goal…doesn’t seem to be worth it for a lot of players.

Airk - Looking back on it, I honestly thing the biggest problem was that from 1987 or so, I was an arcade guy, and (for the most part) the business model for arcade games was “go as far as you want as long as you keep shovelling in tokens”. There was simply no financial incentive to have huge stumbling blocks or painful requirements or near-impossible tasks. That worked for me, and even for the really expensive games (I’m looking at you, Crime Fighters), it didn’t feel like a complete screwjob, so the frustration never really built. I don’t remember a single time I’ve screamed at an arcade game (except for that one really bad night at the Beatmania IIDX machine, of which the less said the better), which was, regrettably, a fairly common occurrence for computer and NES games. Thankfully, it’s the modern age, where finding something that works for oneself is not a hassle, so I’ve decided to just put the past behind.

Male, BTW. :slight_smile:

hogarth - (I was going to PM you on this, but your account isn’t allowing it.) I’m curious as to which two Assassin’s Creed games you’re talking about. There are a couple that I’d consider relatively easy, at least regarding the main game, but I’m drawing a blank on an “insanely hard” one, or at least one that I can positively say is insanely hard.

70

Yes, it was the same amount of guilt I felt playing Guantlet at the arcade, the utter shame of Galaxians, the bitter remorse of Dragon’s Lair, etc. as I shattered pixelated soul after pixelated soul throughout the 1980s-onward.

(Unless I’m being wooshed here.)

71

I probably wouldn’t. But I did enjoy retiring as a governor or duke or one of the other top possibilities. And the moments of stumbling into the Treasure Fleet and taking it out with a sloop, taking advantage of the light winds to out-maneuver the galleons or capturing a Ship of the Line with a pinnace by rushing it and winning the duel (usually with zero men left but you’d recruit enough crew from your victory to form a skeleton crew) or luring Havana’s troops into a swamp ambush and decimating their cavalry in the jungles and getting some scrap of paper detailing where your lost sister is with one two square island in a sea of blue and knowing exactly where it was based on the one tree.

I haven’t watched videos for any of the other games you listed either since watching other people play games sounds as horribly dull as you seem to find Sid Meier’s Pirates! :smiley: But I’ll happily agree that few people probably want to watch my 30 hours of game play to retire in my mansion with one of the prettier governor daughters (I remember being partial to the one with the cat).

72

I remember playing an Ultima game where there was the same “loot everything” mechanic that most games had. You’d wander into folks’ houses and rifle through any clickable item.

Except that near the very end of the game, my characters were evaluated for their virtue, and I was found lacking because of my thievery, and couldn’t proceed in the game.

I wasn’t crazy about that setup.

73

My apologies for using hyperbole, but in the thread linked below you mentioned that in AC: Syndicate “combat is way harder than before and you have much less margin for error” which is not something I noticed at all.

https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=830548

I think you revised some of your comments about Syndicate in a later thread (linked below), but you still said “there are many, many, MANY demands on your funds this time, so you’re going to have to spend carefully for much of the game” which (again) is not something I noticed at all.

https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=843552

EDIT: I might also have been confusing things with comments made in the Subnautica thread that Balance mentioned above.

74

Yeah, that’s what I mean. He has some legitimate criticism mixed in with stuff that’s more just taste. I just wish he’d separate the two. Or at the very least stop acting like his taste or personal difficulty means that the games are actually bad.

If the title was just “games I have trouble with” or “games I don’t like,” it wouldn’t feel so confrontational. And maybe that would help with not being so ranty.

I do sympathize with the idea of needing to not rant so much for your health. I’ve also been trying to cut down for similar reasons.

75

Huh, that’s weird. The only games I remember that actually like, evaluated you on your Virtue were Ultima IV and V, and both of them pretty much kept a real-time-visible-tally and wouldn’t let you proceed past certain points without it. Though if we’re talking about “clicking on” things, it must be Ultima 6 or newer, since we didn’t even have mice before then.

I dunno, does anyone remember any penalties for low virtues in Ultima 7?

Oh wait. Please tell me you’re not talking about Ultima 9? Was it 3d?

Also, DKW, I find it fascinating that you say there was no financial incentive to have “huge stumbling blocks or painful requirements or near-impossible tasks”; This seems the opposite of things to me. In arcades, the financial incentive was to have a game be as HARD AS POSSIBLE without making the player quit, because that would mean the largest number of quarters sunk in. This is, for example, why Gauntlet literally has your health tick down every second. On the other hand, with anything post arcade, there was no real incentive to difficulty, since you’re more likely to get repeat players (as in “people to buy the sequel”) if the game gives them a nice sense of accomplishment.

But what really bugs me about your rants is how you assert that if we like a game, it means we like “getting lost, losing ships, staving off mutiny by an eyelash, running out of food, getting stuck like a pincushion in sword fights, getting creamed in naval battles, getting creamed in land battles, getting rebuffed by snobbish governors’ daughters, getting the door slammed in your face by crown-grovelling Spanish merchants, not being able to find the place on the map, having the wind change direction to directly in your face, and retiring as a lowly farm hand for the 500th time fun” whereas I regard Pirates! as being, frankly, pretty damn easy unless you start going up into the upper tiers of difficulty (I think there were 5 levels, and anything below 4 felt like a cakewalk to me). And… so many of those issues that you complain about could have been resolved just by lowering the difficulty. I just don’t get it. There’s something wrong with your relationship with games.

76

Granted, this was in the early nineties or maybe even late eighties, so my memory is really sketchy. I think there was some set of standing stones I came to where i had to be evaluated, and it said something about having stolen too much stuff; up to that point, I had no idea that the game kept any track of theft. Maybe I just wasn’t paying attention? (And the “clickable” thing may also be a misremembrance. Again, a really long time ago).

Edit: I think it was Quest of the Avatar, IV. I just read the Wiki article, and it looks like Honesty was the virtue I failed in, and you had to talk to some seer in Lord British’s castle to get the updates on how you were doing with your virtues. Maybe I skipped those conversations.

77

Progress through the virtues was pretty much the entire point of Ultima IV. And even there, you couldn’t get stuck by it: You could always go back and atone for previous bad decisions. Well, strictly speaking, using the Skull of Mondain could kill off critical NPCs and make the game unplayable from that point forward, but the only way to even find the Skull was to go actively looking for it, and every clue you had to its location was accompanied by a warning that you didn’t want it, and you never needed to find it at all, and killing off all of the NPCs in a town (and then not having them respawn when you re-entered the town) should have been an obvious tell that something was broken.

78

Yeah; Aside from the Skull, all virtue “issues” in Ultima 4 were fixable. It might have been tiresome, but they were fixable. This was also the game that literally gave you a visual indicator for how you were doing, virtue-wise, because if you did well enough in any given virtue, the game would say “Thou has gained an eighth!” and you’d get a couple of pixels (Hey, the game was low res) in an obvious spot on your UI, and as you gained more of them, it would turn into an ankh. I don’t really see how “Yeah, thievery might be a bad idea” wouldn’t be pretty obvious. I mean, this is also the game where literally the PLOT is “You’re gonna need to become an avatar of virtue”. There’s tons of dialogue and even stuff in the manual about the virtues and how to uphold them. Not even by “skipping conversations” – I mean, you could “skip” (Not read) the conversations about virtues, but if you do, you will literally make zero progress in the game.

I can understand not LIKING Ultima IV if you’re just looking for a game where you’re a badass and kill things, but it’s really not a game that plays “gotcha” with you. If you’re going to make any progress at all, you’re going to do it by doing Virtue Stuff.

Maybe you just spent a bunch of time wandering around and killing stuff and finally bumped into the “actual plot” and the game basically told you “Knock it off with all the thieving” and you got annoyed and quit, but hadn’t actually made any real progress yet?

79

Come to think of it, the business about the virtues is literally unavoidable. Even if you never talk to any NPC ever, at all, the way you create your character in the first place is through a set of hypothetical questions to pit the virtues against each other, to see which virtue (and corresponding class) corresponded most closely to you.

“You have been tasked with delivering a sack of coins to a distant lord. Along the way, a beggar stops you and asks for money. Do you Honorably deliver all of the coins, or show Compassion and give he beggar a few coins, knowing that they won’t be missed?”

80

The biggest challenge was to take on a Count level Pirate hunter in a ship o’ the line with a heavy galleon(crewed by 8) because you had to plan everything precisely to get that whale to avoid taking damage and being screwed before you can board, while you can’t fire back.