I finally caved and bought a copy of Majesty. It’s a good game, with a nice interface, and good graphics, and I thought it might give me a few ideas to help support my Dungeon Mastering habit.
So, I read the rules. (Yeah, I know. So sue me.) It looked good. Not simple, but they started you out with some Beginner level quests, so it should be pretty easy…
What a blast. I played for hours, finishing all the Beginner quests, and then playing on after the quests were done, getting the kingdom in perfect working order and fine-tuning my understanding of the interface.
Then I took a deep breath, double-clicked on an Advanced quest, listened to the briefing, and in no time flat, got my royal butt kicked all over the kingdom and back again, several times.
Damn minotaurs.
So, what I hate most about computer games is the patented “Sudden Jump In Necessary Skill Levels”, i.e., Level 1 is cake. Level 2 would take Bruce Willis and a truckload of ILM effects gurus a month to beat. I mean, I know it should be tough, but ramp up to it gradually, you know?
Well, I’ve got some Minotaur butt to kick. Any other gaming peeves out there?
…but I’m really just bitter because of the death of the adventure game.
You remember them; damn near everyone played them for a while. Space Quest. Phantasmagoria. King’s Quest. Hero Quest. Grim Fandango. Monkey Island. Day of the Tentacle. The 7th Guest. Sam and Max Hit the Road. Gabriel Knight. Today, however, the once-proud genre is all but dead.
Sure, there was that last Monkey Island game, and let’s not forget Sierra’s beautiful Gabriel Knight 3, but those are literally the only two adventure games I can remember seeing in the past year. And I am a former Babbage’s employee and am still a frequent reader of PC Gamer. I like to think I keep abreast of the gaming world. Adventures are no more.
Heed my warning, game companies! Someday the gaming marketplace will not be saturated with little punks blinded by bloodlust. Someday, gamers will again hunger for characters, puzzles, and plot. All you will have to offer will be the same old rehashes of roleplaying games and first-person shooters. And then where will we be?
Note: I am not opposed to the existence of the roleplaying games and FPS’s per se. What really gets my panties in a bunch is the fact that they often seem to be the only things out there. It seems that these types of games, which I enjoy playing often, have killed my favorite genre. ::sniff:: Please come back, Roger Wilco. All is forgiven.
Now, does anyone have something worthwhile to contribute to mrvisible’s thread?
I am so glad that I’m not the only one who feels this way! Even the last “King’s Quest” game appeared to be a first-person 3D monster killing spree (I couldn’t bring myself to buy it even though I’ve been playing the series since I was a kid). I don’t like games where you just killkillkill, it’s boring. I’d rather explore a new world, talk to interesting characters, solve well-crafted puzzles…<sigh>
I too mourn the lack of adventure games - Grim Fandango is my favorite game of all time. But what I really, really hate about about the modern gaming industry:
Twitch reflexes. Evidently kids who grew up with gaming consoles might have or want to have the coordination required to punch in lightning fast combinations, but I’ve got better things to do. Even in games with high adventure/low combat, there seems to be a lot of this crap. Why?
Constant fighting. Especially random combat. I liked Final Fantasy 7 and 8 for the graphics, the story, all that, but I hated combat, and you couldn’t go five minutes without fighting something. I hate that. I also got stalled about three quarters of the way into 8 by fights I couldn’t beat, so I missed seeing a fourth of the game I paid for. That really irks me. Give me an option to load back to a saved game five times or so and then say screw it, let me win. Better yet, do like Grim Fandango or Sanitarium and don’t make me fight at all. That’s what I really like.
I hate it when games turn ass-tastic in the later parts of the game.
Half-life is a perfect example of this with the “Zen” levels. While Thief: The Dark project was a quality game, it also should have stuck with the earlier premise.
I hate save points. I mean, Oni is a pretty cool game and all, but I’d like to not play the same stretch of level over and over and over because I suck.
[sub]That being said, I can here Konoko calling me now… Must go.[/sub]
If it helps, keep your eyes open for a game called Morrowind in the next year and a half or so. It’s being produced by Bethesda Softworks, the KINGS of huge, immersive gameplay environments. Read more about it here.
I dunno, man, from the first entry to Xen and on, I was running on pure adrenalin the whole time. I mean, it just… kept… going!
I hate it when games bump up their difficulty to insane levels at the very end. Deus Ex was one of these. I loved the game, it gradually got more difficult as you progressed through the game, but your character and your skill playing him got better as well, so it didn’t get unplayable. Then I get to the last level, which is far harder than any yet, but I am still able to get a ways into it, then they start throwing every tough enemy at you at once. I tried and tried, and finally gave up.
All time favorite game ever:
StarFlight. Game took 4 years to be developed, and took me months of constant play to solve. Not only exciting combat, but hundreds of worlds to discover, colonize, cool artifacts from alien races to use, and a lot more. It wasn’t just a “shoot to kill” game, you had to visit each different alien race, talk to them to get clues to the puzzle, and then put it all together. Great game.
For more info on it, as well as progress on developing a 3rd installment of the game. I have an old 486, just waiting for it. (game runs too fast on modern systems, can’t read any of the dialog)
Didn’t have too much difficulty with the last level of Deus Ex. Keep in mind that your underslung grenade launcher (mmm…20mm ammo…) and sabot rounds are your friends on this mission. Use regen a lot. Etc.
There have been a few adventure games in the last year beyond those mentioned above. The Longest Journey comes to mind.
I agree that Thief went in the wrong way near the end. I really hated the pagan levels. I wish it had stayed in the horror/thieving missions. Oh, well. I still replay it quite a bit.
My only real gripes about games revolve around unfair AI (e.g. the type of AI you see in bad fighting games) and jumping puzzles. I’m also not thrilled about micromanagement, but luckily that doesn’t seem to be in vogue.
If a game is overly derivative (e.g. yet another quake clone), I just won’t play it in the first place and it becomes a moot point.
I just want to say that I too, sadly, miss the adventure game. My all time favourite series is Sierra’s Quest for Glory. I felt it was better than King’s Quest because it combined an element of RPG with increasing stats, the occaisonal monster fight, and being able to transfer characters from one game to the next.
I still have yet to purchase Quest for Glory V: Dragon Fire yet because I played the demo and, at least in the demo, the 3D was not very good. Should have kept the old style.
I, for one, am patiently waiting for the addon to Diablo II. In the meantime, I’m trying some of the other new games. There’s one, the title of which I can’t remember, which was in the works for three years. Brought it home, played it a while, thought “It took three years to create this piece of crap?” and returned it. The game itself is just fine, but it’s too damn hard to control with that interface!
http://www.theunderdogs.org has hundreds of old, abandonded or overlooked, games. I have just racked up about 20 hours playing Princess Maker 2 and am now having a wonderful time playing the old Bloodbowl conversion. I also found a copy of Omega!!! Anyone remember that? Now THAT is an example of a beautifully graded skill increase.
The Adventure game is not dead. There are many people still writing text-only adventures using a port of the old Infocom engine, plus a couple of others. There is a huge archive of adventure games, some crap, some real quality. There is even an annual competition.
My least favorite thing about computer games is this:
Not enough cool games for Macintosh.
Yes, I am aware that things are getting better. I mean, I nearly passed out when I strolled into the software store and saw “Oni” already out for the Mac. Same for Star Trek Voyager Elite Force.
But still, the wife and I are thinking we might just get an iMac and a Playstation 2. I mean, that way we get a DVD player in the bargain. And the graphics are nearly as good as an enhanced Mac.
Only 20 hours? Mustn’t have had it too long, huh…? That’s only 3 or 4 kids. I’ve raised that many for each job! (Well…for 4 of the 14 jobs I’ve successfully raised a kid to… (Writer, Artist, Housewife, Hero.) Actually…I don’t think I’ve raised less than 5 of any of those…) It’s HARD to get some jobs, though…it’s harder to get a nun or a scholar than it is to get a hero, actually…
Tygr, Oni is a Bungee game. Ten years ago Bungee was started as a gaming company specializing in Mac games–any PC versions were the ports, not the other way around. (Marathon was thier big hit) Now that may change in the near future, as Bungee was recently bought out by Microsoft–so the fact that Oni had a Mac version may well be the swan song of an era, not a hopeful sign of things to come.
I used to play that game all the time on my old Mac LC. I only had a 12" monitor, so the screen would clip off the left third horizontally and vertically.
Interesting piece of trivia:
Bungie open-sourced the Marathon Infinity engine. There’s been a great deal of work recently to port it to Linux with additional features (such as opengl acceleration, fogging, more). There’s also a preliminary windows port, so pc users can play around with Marathon Infinity, too.
Unlike all of you intellectuals who like to solve games, I like games that I can win by dint of my violent streak and awe-inspiring jedi reflexes. I don’t want to solve a game, I want to beat it into submission.
My favorite games are Quake 1 and 3. There’s no feeling quite like watching the graceful arc of a grenade, then following it bounce (intentionally) off of two walls and blow up your best friend. Man, I miss college sometimes.
