Oh, and Fenris: that was my favorite level in Tron 2.0. Only took me three tries to beat it, but then I reloaded my last save and played it three more times just for fun. What can I say, I’m a sucker for a sniper rifle. I usually had enough time to take two or three shots at a guy if I missed the first time, depending on where he entered the level from, though. IIRC, one of the attrubutes you could pump up when you gained a level… I mean, version… increased your rate of fire: maybe that made the difference for me.
Quicksave has effectively ruined all non-multiplayer games for me now - at least with save-at-the-end-of-the-level games you had to work at them a bit, now dying just isn’t that important. A particularly bad example of this is the sniper level in Medal of Honour for the PC;
- Quicksave
- Walk forward until you get shot and die
- Quickload
- Walk forward to the point just before you died
- Shoot the enemy sniper’s left elbow (or the only part of him you can see) until he dies.
- Go to step 1
Just takes the challenge out of games.
True, but if you don’t save, it’s almost fricken impossible to finish that damn level, particulary with your idiot tank crew who have this tendency to run out and get themselves killed.
You know, you could just not use the quicksave button. Just because they included a feature doesn’t mean you have to use it. For really good FPS, I usually play them a second time through, without ever saving in the middle of levels, just to see how far I can get. Really extends the replayablity for me.
Along those same lines: The Royal Guard is able to keep all of the dragons and vampires away from the capitol, so it’s more or less safe. But they can’t make any headway at all against those dang imps. Then again, the alternative seen in Ultima: Exodus may even be less logical: You get the same monsters everywhere, but they depend on your level. And all monsters carry the same random range of treasure. So you build up about ten thousand experience points killing orcs and skeletons, then visit the King to all of a sudden level up, and the place is now swarming with dragons.
I agree with DocCathode that computer games would be a lot better if they were more flexible, but that’s not necessarily something which should be held against them. It’s not a problem of concept, but of execution. I’m sure that the folks making RPGs would like to include illusions and the like, but the fact is that with the current state of the art in AI, it’s just not possible to do it well yet. The best they can do is design specific challenges to be solved by illusions, and then give you a very limited choice on what to do, and that’s only a little better than not including them at all (or perhaps actually worse, since it sort of rubs it in).
Oh, and here’s something else annoying in RPG’s. I like open-ended gaming in general – that is, where you can do the “main story” plot, or a few side quests, or advancement quests, or perhaps do portions of the main story in multiple order. The Ultima series and the Might and Magic series were good about that.
However, it gets out of hand if you get to a point where you just can’t tell what the next step in the “main story” plot is. You’re going along just fine, and you want to do the next thing, but – where do you go? What do you do? This can happen either because of player inattention (an NPC told me what to do, once, but I’ve forgotten it), or game design (they expect you to explore, and come upon the next part of the plot somewhere).
It’s least likely to happen in those games with a “quest list” feature, which is why I like that type of feature.
I don’t know if this is still a problem in games since I barely play computer games anymore at all, but it used to bug the heck out of me in those old Infocom games:
The possibility of getting “stuck” with no hope of advancement except starting over, because you happen to have missed some essential chance which you had no way of knowing you HAD to take. I remember in Zork 3, after a certain number of moves, there would be an earthquake. The game would tell you that the ground was shaking, and after 1 turn, it would be over. You’d think “oh, that was interesting.” Well, this earthquake produced rubble that blocked off a passage in one of the rooms… but you’d have no way of knowing that unless you happened to be in the room at the time, or had visited the room before. So I never knew that the passage had once been open; I thought the description of it being blocked by rubble was simply a permanent part of the room’s description, or else a puzzle to be solved by somehow moving the rubble. I wandered around for hundreds of moves, trying to figure out how to progress, not knowing I needed to get an item or solve a puzzle that was now permanently off-limits to me. I never knew until I obtained the hint book years later that you had to get to that room, enter that passage, and do whatever needed to be done in there before move 100 or whenever the earthquake came.
A lot of those Infocom games were like that. Either you had to get somewhere by a certain turn number, or you were dependent on a finite resource like the lamp battery in Zork I or the loaf of bread in Enchanter. I always used to say that if I ever wrote a text adventure, I’d make it so it was impossible to get stuck–no matter where you were, what you’d done or hadn’t done, it would always be possible, from that point on, to somehow finish the game.
For the record, I have the same opinion of BG1, for all the same reasons you give and more.
It was actually more maddening for me, because there was such a potentially good game lurking beneath the crack-brained design decisions. Who the hell thought it was a good idea to make the game 40 or 50 hours long…and then only let you advance SIX CHARACTER LEVELS. And in all that space you only get potentially…what 30 or 40 different magic items…? For such a huge game there’s very little variety.
Moreover, the way NPC’s could join your party made a lot of the character decisions kinda silly. Want to make a thief? You have a better one waiting outside your front door. Want to play a ranger? There’s a really good one one or two areas away from the starting town. Mages? Take your pick! Looks like I’m going to be a fighter or cleric…
And the game would seriously have benefited from having a run command. Having to slog across all that wilderness was seriously dull. Oh, look, a tree. Wow, another tree. Hey, a rock…
On the other hand, the game was really well written, had beautiful art and music and could have been so much better if they had actually hired playtesters and listened to them.
It’s not like you have to use the save. The one thing that kept Hitman from being a great game was its lack of saves. I spent ages on one of the last levels (the one with the nuclear bomb on board a ship). The first 20 minutes or so were routine - shoot two guys, take their clothes, follow another guy through the gate, follow the railroad tracks, shoot six dogs with silenced gun when no-one’s looking, shoot guy by truck, take bomb, shoot a couple more dogs, shoot eight guys to get through gates.
Then it got tricky. I never got on board the ship without being found out, don’t ask me why. But having to play through twenty minutes of the same stuff over and over and over again just to be killed through bad luck at the end just isn’t fun.
Still finished it, though. Still liked it. But no saves at all? Please.
They had a demo. You could have waited and read an in-depth review. But you chose to buy a real-time game, after you said you hate real time RPG’s. Dn’t complain about it. And yeah, I don’t agree that your experience makes a game crap. You don’t like it. Big deal. A game is objectively bad for objective reasons. I don’t care for the Mona Lisa, but that doesn’t mean my opinion is relevant to the technical artistry involved. Pools of radiance was, for me, dull, but what made it bad was the fact that many, many people had unendurable technical issues with the game, which they had no foreknowledge of and could have known (and with Ubisoft’s systematic purging of their own forums, could not have known about.
I still hold my opinion: if you buy a game right off the bat, you have no right to complain about it sucking. You took your chances.
I’d agree that the lack of in-game saves made it a lot harder than it needed to be. Fun, sometimes, but it also gave rise to real frustration. Some of Hitman 2’s stages were just brutal if you couldn’t or didn’t want to use your precious savegames.
I enjoyed Hitman a lot more than Hitman 2. I had fun in both, but Hitman 2 had some seriously inconguities. In Hitman one, you could handily fool almost anyone into accepting you as one of their own with the proper disguise. In a very early stage you could convince a police comissioner and a Tong member that you were another Tong member by putting on his hat and coat. I have no idea how they confused your white-bread vaguely Anglo-guy with A Tong member, but it worked well enough. In Hitman 2, the enemies were telepathic. For some ungodly reason, Russian soldiers would shoot their fellows if they saw them running by. Never figured this out. Additionally, on some of the later stages there were telepathic Ninjas. Seriously, even if you were wearing a face mask, they could spot you right away and shoot you dead.
Actually, in retrospect, it is kind of amusing. But it wasn’t very fun or funny at the time. Hitman 2 made the game’s path a lot more limited, which.
According to what I’ve heard and experienced in the demo, the enemy will know you’re an infiltrator in disguise if you run: however, if you walk, they’ll think you’re one of them. Apparently there’s some universal “if you run you’ll get shot” rule going on with the bad guys in that game.
I found that to be a fairly easy level. Did you try the Zoom program upgrade? It gives you a nice sniper scope to use with the rifle. Zoom in and pick off every guy with a head shot. Piece of cake.
smiling bandit, so, you’re saying that for a game to be good, it simply has to not have any bugs? That’s… insane springs to mind as an aplicable adjective. Pool of Radiance was a bad game because it was dull. It could have been the most stable computer program since Pong, it still wasn’t any damn fun to play.
Oh, and I’m vastly amused by your “You could have played the demo, you should have known what the game was like, you got no right to complain,” in light of your recent pit thread, which you valiantly abandoned as soon as it started turning on you. I think perhaps further exchanges between us should be relegated there, since I don’t see much point in being civil with you any more.
Regarding quicksave vs. save point:
I notice that not a single post on the issue actually talk about saving. They start by stating which mode they love/hate, and then spend the rest of the post discussing level design. This is the core of the issue.
Quick saving isn’t evil. As stated, you do not strictly have to use them if you don’t want to. In my personal opinion quicksaves lose in this regard, because merely the option they provide remove a lot of tension from games. Winning that intense boss fight just feels a lot better when you actually stood to lose something by failing. The problem arises as the level designers have to take this into acount. How do you make a game challenging when the player has an infinite amount of saves readily available, not knowing how often the player is going to utilize them? The sniper level in MoH:AA for instance is a good example; for quick savers this and Omaha Beach are the only places which will provide even the slightest challenge, but the downside is that in making levels which challenge the quicksavers, you also effectively remove this option for anyone who wants to play “purist”. In levels like these you do not have the option of not using them. Again IMO there is a very clear pattern of inconsistent gameplay in nearly all quicksave enabled games. They tend to go from cakewalk easy to impossibly difficult, often with very little warning to the player (if he senses danger he will quicksave).
Save point games are more consistent in this, and generally have “better” level design. However, save point games also put a LOT more responsibility on the level designer to get this right. There are rules governing the positioning of spawn points. Rules which rarely ever can be broken without consequenses to the player’s gameplay experience;
-Hard battles, difficult jumps and amubushes go immediately after a save point. Yes, you can create a lot of tension by putting these things between the player and that vaunted save. Don’t.
-No more that 5-10 minutes should pass between one point and another. Regardless of the difficulty of the obstacles in between.
-Spawn points are never to be hidden or even optional. The player has to save in order to proceed.
-They will return the player to full health or be positioned close to a healing point.
-The player is allowed to spawn at any point which he has previously activated, or at the least has the option to save to different slots if he wants to.
Too often these rules, or others which I have surely missed, are broken and the results can be disastrous. Players get stuck for hours or even permanently at some ill-conceived puzzle. They have to wander through half a level of tediousness every time they fail that way too difficult jump. They find themselves in an unwinnable position impossibly low on health before a major battle. These are the things which you blame the save points for, and for which you should be blaming the kind of lousy-ass level design that has ruined so many otherwise excellent games 
Conclusion, quick save games are easier to get right, but save point games have much more potential for greatness (IMO IMO IMO).
Personal pet peeve: Games which can’t make up their minds. Multi player games which for some reason have to tack on a half-assed campaign, just because they “must” have them. Vice versa. FPS which for some reason has to turn into a sniper game for 15 minutes mid-game. Great driving games with a sorry excuse for an fps tacked onto it (you heard me). Some games manage to cross several genres successfully, but they do so because all inclusions to the game have a definite purpose in their vision. Too many producers just want one more thing to tack onto the box, wasting efforts which could be spent on perfecting the core gameplay. I like games which aim for perfection in one area, rather than mediocrity in all of them.
I’ve met people that absolutely loved Pool of Radiance. The majority did not, and I am firmly with the majority. But that doesn’t mean that the peolpe who loved PoR had bad taste or liked a bad game. It means their tastes dont agree with mine. PoR was, however, technically incompetant, in the sense it was bug-ridden and had a ludicrously poor uninstaller, which was entirely the fault of the developer crew and their management.
I reject the notion of good art or bad art, only art I like and that which I do not like. There are, however, things I do not consider art. Similarly, I consider Baldur’s Gate to be a game. I enjoyed it, I do not consider my enjoyment of it to be a universal truth, but despise the notion of any media being inherently good or bad. But my beef with you rests on what I see as foolish behavior.
I was playing the first release of it. Its my job. I was criticizing the (IMHO) greed of Nintendo. I still hold that opinion. I have nothing more to say in the thread, and no one’s arguments or slams against me have given me any reason to change my mind. Note that I didn’t say I the game itself was bad.
Offensive: Excellent point. I don’t usually mind jumping puzzles, even in FPS, except when the penalty for making a minor mistake is instant death. The second to last level in the first Buffy: The Vampire Slayer game was a huge headache, because it had no mid-level save points, and mostly consisted of jumping puzzles over bottomless chasms. The slightest error meant starting the whole level over again, and this just about broke the game for me. After trying and dying dozens of times, I finally took a six-month haitus from the game before I mustered up enough interest to go back and finally beat it. And I’m glad I did: the final boss fight was pretty cool. But that one level was a goddamn nightmare.
Which brings up another stupid concept in video games. Or rather, over-used cliche. The crazy floating rock level. You know, the inevitable level where you get sucked into an alternate dimension which is made up of big flat-topped, pointy-bottomed rocks suspended in mid-air, usually with some sort of ancient ruin built on top. Like the end of Half-Life. What’s with these levels? Why do game designers feel compelled to mess up a perfectly good video game by dropping you into a level that looks like it came from a bad Dr. Strange comic?
Actually, I think I know what they were going for. They wanted to create a totally alien enviroment, and to some extent, they suceeded. But the jumping puzzles were just annoying and I usally stop playing once I get to Xen.
Actually, they did notice. There’s this little conversation about how it’s unusual that a Tong would be a Westerner, and the Hitman explains that his father was a friend of Lee Hong or something. It’s much weirder in other levels, such as the Lee Hong Assassination, where you can dress as the only non-Asian guard in the entire building and get away with it. In fact, you needed to dress as a guard to get to the brothel, but once there everyone assumed you were a civilian. Never did figure that out.
There was one guy like that in Hitman, the big fat guy in a red robe who was Lee Hong’s personal bodyguard. He always knew it was me. Afterwards I looked through walkthroughs and the like, and they never mention the problem. Maybe he just didn’t like my smell.
Yeah, but the thing is, it’s pretty much identical to the level I was stuck on in Buffy. Or the “shattered world” you end up going to in the Blood Elf campaign in Frozen Throne. Or the alternate dimension in the episode I just saw of the Justice League cartoon. I get that they were trying to create a totally alien enviroment, but they used the same idea everybody uses when they try to create a totally alien enviroment.
Sorry, but are you saying you’re a professional game reviewer? And you think it’s some kind of gross injustice to refer to a game you don’t like as a “bad” game? I don’t suppose any of your stuff is online? Because I just got to see how you review games.
Donkey Kong Country.
Okay, so you have this massive gorilla. It can throw barrels, it can kill things bigger than it is, it can jump decently far, it can swing on a rope, for crying in the mud. Hell, you can even make it dance and catch fish and ride a rhino or an ostrich (how an ostrich can move with a gorilla on its back is another thing I wonder about)!
…Oh no! A BEE! Run for your life! AAAAAAAAAAAAAH!
I also find leeching (getting life back for hitting things) to be a massively stupid concept in D2 and D2XP. I’m aware that it’s fairly necessary unless you want the characters doing physical damage to be forever portaling back to town to buy potions, but … I hit you! I gain health! Raaah!
Magic find is another useful, but incredibly stupid, concept. “I am wearing this armor with four perfect topazes, so my odds of finding a green or gold item by besting this foe is increased!” Even more amusing, but also useful, is the barbarian skill “find item”, in which the barb basically shouts at a corpse and stuff either comes out or it doesn’t. See that weapon that just came out that does 100-150 base damage and lots of other fancy things? Why the hell did you eat that instead of using it, dear slain beast?
I’m just glad they got rid of the hard cap on stats, because it used to be (back in D1 or early D2) that once your strength/dex/vit/energy got so high, you couldn’t put it any higher.
Being able to have a nuclear reactor very close to a residential area has to rank top five easy, though. No, not a game called Chernobyl. Try Sim City or one of its successors.