Actually, head-bob was added to FPS games because a lot more people are nauseated when there is no head-bob than with. A lot of people couldn’t play Wolfenstein 3D because of the nausea it caused.
Luckily, most FPS games allow you to disable head-bob in the console if you are one of the minority who find it more nauseating than no head-bob.
My number one peeve in any game is not being able to skip the non game playing parts. Obviously this would have to do with cut scenes, but the worst offense I’ve ever played was in an otherwise great game, XENOGEARS. If you’ve played it, I’m sure you know that there was no way to skip text, or to even speed it up. So you would have to sit through minute after minute of slow text, no matter if it had any importance or not. The worst was when you had the fifteen minute long scene right before a big boss fight. If you lost the fight, guess what you got to sit through the next time you tried the fight? This is the reason it took me two years to get around to actually beating the game.
Of course this complaint of mine encompasses all delays. Load screens I can tolerate, but if I have to watch your stupid publisher animation or that damn introduction one more time, well, heads won’t roll but I’ll be really annoyed.
STUPID GAME CONCEPT: The original D for the Playstation was supposed to be beaten in two hours. You had no saves, just beat the game in under two hours. About ten minutes in I realized how annoying this was. But what the hell, in for a dime in for a dollar. It takes me almost the whole two hours (I’m not the brightest), but I finally get to the last scene.
SPOILER BELOW
In the game you can embrace the evil of the main villain or you can choose to oppose him. Naturally if you choose to oppose him you shoot him, which takes one button. But if you are momentarily confused like I was you press forward. Guess what, I just embraced the evil and got the bad ending. Two hours of my life gone. Stupid, stupid game concept!
Count me in with the people that dislike real time combat. I bought BG2 first, and had a lot of problems playing at first, due to the combat. Finally, after I got through the first dungeon, I gave in, and had the game pause as much as possible so I could micromanage everything. The AI only made this worse, and much of the reason I switched was so I never had to use it.
Me? I hate fetchquests. Endless, endless fetchquests. Or the insane amount of widget collecting required in so many console games these days.
So what if it is the opposite? I still don’t like it. Just because you tell me that my dislike is the opposite of that of the herd, it won’t make me like playing Diablo II. What’s your point?
I hate it because you work all the way up a one-way ladder to get to a particular ability and, if it turns out that ability turns out to be no good, you’ve wasted your time getting all the way up there, say all the way up to a level 18 electricity schtick. Now in order to try something else you have to work your way up to level 18 fire to decide which one is better. How stupid. Especially in Diablo where making multiple save-points for a character is a royal pain in the ass. I refuse to play the first 15 levels of Diablo over again because of starting a new character to try abilities I’ve never seen.
In a game like Morrowind you can find a scroll for most of the spells. You can buy the scroll and try it out. (Or you can hire someone to cast it on you.) You can see if the scroll does something you like and is a benefit to your character design. And if you like it you can buy the ability. In Diablo, you can… nothing. You can work your way up and tentatively put one point into a skill and on that basis you must judge if that skill will ever be worth more points and you can’t go back.
I agree it’d be asinine to unravel all of your points from your level-60 character and redeploy them on a whim. There has to be a happy medium, though: maybe you can pay someone to retrain your last 5 points spent, or you only get to move your last (1) point spent and you can only do this while in town/camp. Or something.
Boy, Diablo is boring. What a waste of an otherwise good game design.
I know – the most absurd example of this is Final Fantasy VII’s breeding the gold chocobo.
A meteorite is coming towards the planet, all life is in grave danger, and your characters decide to breed generations of chocobo and race them.
An FPS peeve, here.
It’s about how the player holds weapons…All modern FPS’ that I can think of make your character hold firearms near the far edge of your field of view, angled inwards. While allowing you a very good view of your weapon’s model—which I guess the game developers want everyone to get a gander of, after the time and effort it took to render the thing—I imagine that it would be pretty hard to aim and fire a weapon accurately like this.
[megarant]
I’m going to pretty blunt here, soI apologize in advance. That said, I’m still going to say it:
Your comments on BG1 approach idiocy.
Sorry!
They were going for realism with that. Honestly, monsters are not going to stop fighting because you’re rifling through your pack for that potion or wand or that weapon. You can argue realism was already broken because you already had the option to pause it anytime you wanted, but that’s their opinion, and it wasn’t unfair.
Right. :rolleyes: You’re just another person who thinks his pet peeve and inadquacy makes something objectively sucky. I don’t like inane sidequests either, but I don’t say it makes whole games suck because I don’t appreciate them.
I was a total DnD newbie, and I figured this out within five minutes of getting them.
snort It was really easy if you bothered to move them away fom the enemy. I’ve never had a 1st level mage go down. The fighters and clerics sometimes bought it early on, but it wasn’t a huge problem past level 1.
Dude, you pause the game. You sit there and ponder for ten minutes. Its not that hard.
Fair enough.
There are three of them, and you damned well walk past at least one of them if at all bother to look around. He’s right in the middle of a required stage! On top of that, there are two more right along your likely path. They aren’t off in the boonies.
:rolleyes:
So… turn on the turn-autopause option. Then you would have had turn based. Its NOT THAT HARD PEOPLE!
But what honstly pises me off about your attitude is this expectation that every game must conform to your expectation of features or its crap. Its not like they hid their design to piss you off.
I truly, deeply, utterly despise your ilk, whether its on the turn-based or real-time side of things.
[/megarant]
Okay, smiling bandit, you’re getting a little to worked up that someone else doesn’t like your favorite game. It’s just a game. If it makes you feel better, go ahead and insert “IMO” in front of every sentence I write. It’s all just opinions.
It’s not about fair, or real (Real? I’m fighting a fucking dragon, for the love of Christ!) It’s about fun. This was a dumb idea that drastically reduced the fun of the game. Apparently, even Black Isle agreed with me, because they changed it in the second game.
Yeah, me and everyone else in this thread. What exactly is an objective standard for what is and what isn’t a “stupid” game concept?
Bully for you. It was still bad game design. Why would my mage with an Int of 18 still cast a spell when the only people he’s going to hit are his own party members? Targeting should have been determined at the point the spell activates, not when you start casting. They still haven’t fixed this in NWN. I suppose this is common enough in computer games that singling out BG1 is a little unfair, but IIRC they had already figured this out way back in the original Pool of Radience.
Great. You’re superhuman. My mages had a zero survival rate if there was a bad guy with a missile weapon within a five mile radius.
Yeah, and then you unpause, and you have to make sure the idiot AI for six different characters who might not all be on the screen at the same time is doing exactly what you told it, or if it’s decided that what you really wanted the rogue to do was chase a goblin into the cave full of ogres. This isn’t gaming, it’s babysitting.
Wasn’t one of them turned to stone when you first encounter him?
Well said.
Newsflash: pausing the game DOES NOT MAKE IT A TURN BASED GAME. Okay? Turn-based. I take a turn, you take a turn. Ever play chess? Like that. Turn based. Baldur’s Gate was not turn based, no matter how often you hit the pause button.
My expectation when I buy a game is that it be good. If it’s not good, then yeah, I’m going to be pissed. Baldur’s Gate sucked because of the reasons that I listed, and a boat load of others that I don’t even remember now because it’s been five years since I last played it.
You liked it, that’s fine. That’s the best news I’ve ever heard in the world. You know what, though? You liking the game doesn’t make it any more fun when I play it.
Because of my opinion on a computer game? What do you do to people who disagree with you on important stuff, like politics, or religion? Smash their knee caps with a hammer?
Just about everything mentioned in this thread has been something I like about video games (Illusion of Choice and Jumping Puzzles excluded). I like the fact that, in FF3/6, every clock has an Elixir in it. I’m not a fan of overly realistic games.
What pisses me off? The decline and fall of endings in fighting games. I’ll use an example, unfortunately, it’s a game that you haven’t played or probably even heard of. In Guilty Gear, when you finish the arcade mode, you got a decent ending. It had more than a few screens, and it actually seemed like an ending. In the sequels, Guilty Gear X and X2, it simply showed a screen and scrolled credits over it.* What the hell? It’s even worse because the boss is usually insanely hard to beat.
Same thing with Soul Blade and Soul Calibur 2 (never played SC1, need to get a new Dreamcast). In Soul Blade, you got an animated ending and you could even change the ending with some button presses. (If you’ve never tried it, beat the game with Voldo, then start jamming Up and Down repeatedly when he starts rubbing the sword on his face. It’s pretty funny.) In Soul Calibur 2, you just get a short text scroll and a picture.
*Granted, Guilty Gear X2 had a pretty cool story mode. If you like fighting games, you owe it to yourself to check it out.
Isn’t it interesting how the farthest you get from the starting city, the higher the prices get(and the better the weapons get)?
So Coneria(or midgar), you can buy a stick and a piece of wood to protect yourself.
In little tiny village in a little cove that is extremely hard to get to, you can buy mega armor and kill-o-matic BFG, for the low price of 2 billion dollars a piece.
So why does the biggest city on the planet have the crappiest stuff?
And doesn’t it completely screw the economy of the little hamlet to be paying injecting all that new money into the economy all of sudden, because suddenly the shopkeeper is Bill gates? Or is inflantion just incredibly common in that town, so that’s why everything costs so damn much(or maybe everyone is extremely rich)?
Sorry, this bugs me from a realistic standpoint. I’m not an expert on economics, but somethings seems off about it.
Up until just now, I had never beaten an RPG. This thread has inspired me finally to finish the RPG I’ve been working to beat for the past six months. And now, I can finally say with pride, I have beaten Final Fantasy Mystic Quest for the SNES. Now there’s a game that doesn’t break any of the rules.
I don’t mind that you don’t like it. What I do mind is that you self-righteously declare that its totally crap for everyone. Secondly, its not OK for you to self-righteously complain that the game didn’t have the features you wanted. I’m going to be frank here. They said exactly what was going in it. If you didn’t like that feature, why the hell did you buy it? I have no more sympathy for you than I do with someone who buys Half-Life and complains that its too fast-paced or that there’s too much violence. If you don’t like it, don’t buy it. I don’t really like Sports games. So I don’t buy them. I certainly don’t buy them and then whine about on newsboards because it wasn’t a fighting game.
This is why I use cheat codes. I got Tron 2.0 and thought it a pretty good game with some stunning artwork…until I get to this one level, about 2/3ds of the way through that involved playing “Tower sniper”. A bunch of bad programs were running up a z shaped ramp and you had to shoot them all before they got in the door. Even one gets in? You lose and have to restart the level. Oh, and shooting takes energy so you have to run back and forth to an energy pool, hoping that you won’t miss any of the 50 or so bad-guys that are running up. And you have to keep doing it for 2 minutes real-time. Oh, and they’re far enough away that they’re each only about 40 pixels big or so. Maybe half again the height of one of the SDMB smile icons. And they’re moving fast. You have exactly one shot at each of them and if you miss there’s not enough time to correct. And the only weapon you have that’ll hit at that range apparently has a one pixel area effect.
It sucked.
I played it about 8-10 times, realized that it was impossible, found the “all weapons” and “unlimited weapons” cheat codes and blew them away with (what amounted to) a rocket launcher firing explosive grenades that weren’t available to you until about 10 levels later. I then went on and happily finished the game.
But talk about really stupid game-design.
Fenris
Ah, yes, the famous “What the hell just happened?” moment at which you realize that, even though last level you were kicking ass all over the place, now you’re the gaming equivalent of Pee Wee Herman stuck in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
You’d think that by now the game designers would realize that a gradual increase in difficulty, as opposed to a sudden ramping-up of potential fatalities, is the way to draw gamers in. I keep picturing some sadistic level designer, after a particularly bad day, just cackling in glee as he creates a level that’s sure to just completely piss you off. “Think you’re doing well, huh? I control the monsters! I determine where the health caches are! I set the resistance to your puny weapons! The whole world, it’s mine! Mine! Muwahahahahahaha!”
At which point I switch the game off, and go get some sleep.
I’ve certainly seen the phenomena you describe, but I don’t think that this is that–the game returned to normal after that one section.
In this case, I think it was the fact that, if the game was playtested at all, it was playtested by 15 year old mutant children who’ve had squirrel-D.N.A. spliced into their gene-sequence, given massive doses of speed and forced-fed coffee rather than adults who don’t have the reflexes of a hyperactive-ferrets on speed. 
Honestly, I don’t think that level could be won without cheating.
At least that’s not as bad as those god**** elves in elfland who make healing at an inn 100G when it only costs 30G in Coneria!
Amen! I hate that. Especially in GTA Vice City. I kept constantly failing certian missions, and had to go back and redo them. And I couldn’t skip the explanatory sequence that I had already seen 5 times! It’s freakin’ annoying!
The worst video game idea has got to be Navi from Orcarina of Time. Not only couldn’t you skip her explanations, but she tells you how to do incredibly simple things, and takes way too much time doing so (e.x. in the Deku Tree, where the game stops so Navi can spend three screens telling you how to OPEN A DOOR). What were the people who came up with that idea thinking?!
Another FPS issue for me. I’ve recently been playing a bit of Escape from Wolfenstien, and it reminded me of the glories of the sniper riffle. I love how, with the scope turned on in most FPS, sniper riffles are pretty much one shot kills. Hit them in the shoulder, they’re dead; shoot them in the knee, they’re dead; shoot them in the stomach, they’re dead. Yet, with the scope off, it’s the weakest fucking weapon. Six shots to the chest, and the Nazi’s still gun me down. What’s up with that?
I don’t mind jumping in video games if it is done right. I like being able to control the jumping myself. I always hated when the game just does the jumping like in most Legend of Zelda games. What is the point of having a hole in the road to jump if the game just jumps over it for you?
The absolute worst was a game for the Playstation called Alundra 2. You could control the jumping BUT the only way the jump would work is if the characters feet we above the landing point. No grabbing on to ledges! That really was a pain in some parts.
My only beef with the FF games is that most of the time you have no clue what the ultimate weapons are. In FFX, you can’t even open the chests that contain the weapons unless you have another device. Leave some clues for the players at least! Those are the only games I need to consult a walkthrough to find any of the great items.
GTPD1996
GTPhD1996
As I said, lack of flexibility and not being able to do inventive or creative things.
Fer Example
One of my Vamp The Masquerade characters once got an enemy to flee by bluffing with a paperweight. It was a dud grenade he bought at an army surplus store. Considering that my character was insane and known to be carrying numerous other weapons (2 colt 45s, a taser housed in a Batman squirtgun, and a stun gun housed in a Klingon disrupter, among others) the other guy decided he might have a live grenade and not too concerned about blowing himself up.
Phantasmal force is a spell capable of creating auditory and visual illusions. A menacing glow around your hands or weapons can convine opponents that you’ve just cast a dangerous spell and are much more powerful than you actually are. It can be used to raise money by putting on a display in the village square. Images of dancing girls or annoying folks yelling random things can be used to distract other spell casters. Etc It’s an extremely useful and versatile spell.
And AFAIK, it appears in no D&D computer game.
It is crap. I don’t recall making any proclamations that all must bow before my mighty computer game opinion, but when I played it, I had a crappy time. Therefore, the game is crappy. You disagree. Fine. Your opinion doesn’t invalidate my opinion, any more than my opinion invalidates yours. People like different stuff. There’s no reason to get so pissed about it.
Says who?
Because I really like D&D, and I really like CRPGs, and I thought, “Well, maybe it will still be fun.” But it wasn’t, so I was disappointed. If they really, really wanted to do the game in real-time, they could at least have made it so that it was “fun” real-time, not “put your foot through your monitor in raging frustration” real-time.
I’m not asking for your sympathy, I’m asking for you to be mature enough that you can listen to someone with a different opinion without calling them inadequate, an idiot, or truly, deeply, utterly despicable.
Kinda hard to know if I won’t like it without playing it, first.
Uh-huh. I don’t like sports game, either. I do like RPGs, and I play a metric assload of them, and that’s given me some ideas about what works in RPGs and what doesn’t. Baldur’s Gate didn’t work. It was not a fun game. Maybe I’m the only person on the planet who feels this way, but that’s still my honest opinion of the game. It was not a good game. And I’m not going to sugar-coat my opinion to make it palatable for all the fanboys who can’t tell the difference between what they like and who they are.
