Or The Simpson’s Hit & Run.
Anyone remember the Ceasar series? With Pharoah and Zeus thereafter? Man, that series could be fun but really, really frustrating. See, you zoned for housing, and placed businesses (every bloody one of them) and shops and farms. Then, each workplace sent out a labor-finder unit, which had to go by a house to get workers. Then the workers often had walk paths of their own. Your market ladies would walk buy houses and supply them with food, etc. It could be fun but very frustrating, because you had no control over the walk paths. Expansion, therefore, could be very difficult indeed. It also led to some very odd-looking cities that wouldn’t work IRL.
I never had a problem with him because you could serve him the Fugu, the Fat guy in red would eatit, and you could get away before any alarms were sounded. ;j And they would never nother to look for you. Man, that stage was a beast when you first got there, but surprisingly easy once you figured out its secrets.
There was one thing that really bothered me, though. This was a House of Ill-Repute. You could “order” a prostitute and obtain some useful info in exchange for helping her escape. However, if she led you out onto the roof (obviosuly for some ‘private R&R’ the guards would immediately turn around and shoot you.
It was a very intelligent game, though. I’ve seen few games with its level of raw animal cunning.
Oh, my articles are not all that different from anyone elses. I’ll tell people what I think the attributes of a game are and how I felt playing it, but ultimately that’s all it is: my opinion. It and .50 cents will buy you a cup of coffee. And lots of people in the office don’t like games I might enjoy, and visa versa.
I must offer apologies, though. I was not justified in going off on you before.
I use to hate it in Pitfall where my guy would only try to swing on a rope over a pond full of crocodiles instead of actually RUNNING AROUND THE POND.
I tended to build a lot of 3-way intersections, then keep loading various maps; the prefect map (showed which houses were close to fire), the engineer map (which were going to collapse), etc. Then if something bad wsa going to happen I’d just cut the road in the direction the worker didn’t need to go, and it was like steering said worker. If I onl deleted one road square at a time I could just undo every time I cut and I didn’t have to pay for any of it. Made for some slow playing, but it was the only (neurotic, anal) way to ensure that nothing big and expensive went up in flames or collapsed under its own weight.
It’s not so ridiculous as all that. Life drain has a long tradition in RPGs; the original idea was that you used foul magic to steal someone’s life force and give it to yourself. Diablo basically dispenses with all the explanation for practically everything and just gives you the results.
Thank you. I really do appreciate that.
I disagree. As an OCD sufferrer, the challenge is not simply to make it through a level. It is to do the best I possibly can. What’s the fastest I can make it through a level, while finding all the secrets, using the least ammo, and getting hurt as little as possible?
Back To The Op-
Keys
In Doom, I was willing to let it slide. It’s a military installation involved in potentially dangerous research. It makes sense that the doors and walls would be designed to withstand massive amounts of damage. The base must be capable of keeping an enemy force out, or keeping extra-dimensional hostiles in.
But, in some games not having a key is no excuse. It’s a standard door. You’ve got large caliber weapons. Just shoot the thing!
The best solution I’ve seen to this was in Bureau 13. Your agents had an efficiency rating which changed based on your actions. There were numerous doors you could simply smash through. But, this attracted attention and lowered your rating.
Party Size Limits
I got Ravenloft-Stone Prophet as a gift. Since Mom got it at a yard sale, I couldn’t return it. I decided to see if CRPGs had changed in the many years since I last played one.
Why the party size limit?
Why in the name of Gygax can’t I take all of the 4 or so npcs who offer to join the party with me at the same time? IIRC 2 of them don’t need food or water (one is undead. The other is a desert troll). Is it really beyond the game’s capabilities to have a larger party?
“Diablo basically dispenses with all the explanation for practically everything and just gives you the results.”
–Which is the problem: magic doesn’t feel magical to the player if every item has six magical properties and they’re just treated like numbers on a spreadsheet. That’s the corner Diablo paints itself into by giving the player a new item every three seconds, 99% of which by necessity are complete crap.
As I recall the trick is to make two concentric ring roads, with services in the cenrtre, housing inbetween them and businesses on the outside. The roads can’t be too long or the walkers won’t get round, but if you use those blocking tiles on the cross-roads it should keep itself going quite well.
http://caesar3.heavengames.com/cgi-bin/caeforumscgi/Ultimate.cgi
As a PC gamer, I can’t stand that nearly every game is a sequel or a retread of another game. Over a year ago, I posted the following on another board and it still holds:
I don’t have this years’ Xmas issue with me, but it was still the same. Same sequels, same gameplay, same mods, albeit different packaging. :rolleyes:
*December 2002.
On the other hand, you’ve got to give props to video games as perhaps the only medium in the world where sequels are routinely superior to the originals. Too bad Hollywood can’t manage that.
That’s what all the walkthroughs say, but I could never do it. The second I popped out of the little store where I gave the dragon to the old guy, Fatso would see me, yell, and all hell would break loose. I had to make a run for it, change clothes a couple of times, and cross my fingers to even survive. Like I said, maybe he didn’t like my smell.
Unless you were dressed as a guard. But this is another annoying thing about the game. Why did the girl really need your help? She knew the way out herself. The only thing you did for her was hide her when that guard was walking past, and later on, that very same guard saw the two of you by the gate and the girl escaping, doing nothing. Couldn’t the rescue have required killing a couple of guards, at least?
I can’t blame the Hitman folks too much. They made a game whose premise was violence, that, oddly, allowed you to get through without the use of violence quite often. If the new Hitman chronicles lightens up a bit and uses some of the advanced AI being used nowadays, it will be sweet.
Hitman ruled, no doubt about it. It just had these… little… annoyances.
Halo had an excellent system. It didn’t have “save points” in the typical sense (it had “load points”, though). Every so often, when the player has progressed enough (as far as the game can judge), it’ll save your progress. This was usually triggered during one of the stretches between skirmishes… the end result was that you usually managed to get a save just before a difficult point, but you still couldn’t be totally reckless.
[ul]
[li]the ease and the assumption that you should go through and take other people’s possession at whim is a stupid concept, most evident in RPGs. [/li]
i do not steal stuff in games unless it is needed to advance the story. walking into people’s home and stealing their stuff in front of their eyes, taking everything that is not rooted down as a matter of course, just doesn’t go well with the title ‘hero/saviour/whatever’ that they call you.
[li]the assumption that everyone likes to save and reload. [/li]
when your character dies there should be a penalty that does not spoil the enjoyment of the game, so much so that it’ll make sense to bear out the penalty instead of cheating (by reloading). diablo 2 does this nicely - there is no save and reload! the game is such that it doesn’t hurt much to start over in town. system shock 2 had the correct idea - if you had activated the reconstructor, resurrection only costs a small amount of money; if you have not, you restart the level. baldur’s gate had it wrong - death of a single member entails hiking back all the way out of wherever you are and travelling to the nearest city/temple; death of more than two members would mean an inventory nightmare for all involved.
[li]the ability to sleep anytime repeatedly is a stupid concept, especially in RPGs. i sleep once, maybe twice a day and certainly not after every other combat i come across. not only is that sort of cheating, it doesn’t make sense.[/li]
[li]i don’t think it’s been mentioned yet - starting a game with 10hps and ending it with like 9999hps. i’m still waiting for the ‘sequel’ to Darklands… [/li]
[li]ahh, jumping puzzles. anyone remember MDK2 with the wacky aliens watching you attempting the jumping puzzles? [/li]
[li]carpal tunnel syndrome: diablo 2.[/li]
[li]in case it still isn’t clear yet, i’ll second (or third or whatever) the opinion that turn based games has its place - gimme my turned based games back![/li]
IMHO diablo is an arcade RPG and final fantasy is a console RPG. the thing is RPG simply stands for a role-playing game, saying something is a RPG doesn’t mean it has to conform to the D&D’s idea on role-playing. final fantasy and most console RPGs has been that way for a long time - putting the gamer in the shoes of this or that particular character in a more or less fixed storyline. why are they any less of a role-playing game for that? as for diablo…
as a final note i’ll just say i’m thankful console games are so different from pc games, were they similar it’ll become boring very quickly. [/ul]
What if you’re of evil alignment/ low humanity/ whatever?
Characters who are good should not be swiping everything they can get their hands on. OTOH assassins, necromancers, evil thieves, etc would certainly have no problem with it.
Back when I was on a mudd, I stole from other players’ rooms(it was their fault for failing to lock them.) and occasionally from the offices of the gods. My character was as evil as the system allowed. I killed puppies, children, and altar boys to keep his alignment at -1000. He had no respect for other’s property and he had the skills to take it.
I would also like to protest the over-use of bulk warehouse shipments from the Exploding Barrel And Crate Co., Ltd.
I understand the premise. Some crates have good things in them. Some crates have nothing. Some contain something harmful. It keeps players from gaining bonuses and special goodies, at no risk, for free, without restriction. But come on—I would much rather lose those hit points in a decent battle, not because some idiot goblin keeps barrels full of accelerant in his bedroom. Most of the time it’s just not worth the effort, too. In Diablo you can knock open 50 barrels and scrape together 5 gold pieces, some lint, 80 attack zombies, and 10 neato explosions. Ugh.
Considering that D&D pretty much invented the role-playing game, I kinda think they do.
Because that doesn’t involve any role-playing. Certainly, the player is assigned a role in these sorts of games, but he has no control over that role: he can’t play with it. He just gets to watch. In a roleplaying game, the entire point is crafting a character. Not just stats, but personality, ethics, goals, etc. If the player has no control over those aspects of the game, then by definition the game is not a role-playing game, no more than Civilization III is a flight simulator because it has planes in it.
This is related to your first point, about stealing in games. This is lame in games like Final Fantasy, because your character is always going to be the hero, no matter what he does. This only works in a true RPG, where if you get caught stealing, people will treat you like a thief. That’s what roleplaying is all about: moral decisions. Do you take that +8 Sword of Ass Kicking, and spend the rest of the game running from guards and being distrusted and spat on, or do you abide by the law and pass up the powerful item so that other characters in the game still look up to you? If a game doesn’t allow that sort of decision making, it’s not an RPG.
Again, I’m not knocking FF in the slightest. They’re great games as they are. I like that they’re not RPGs, because by putting the plot and characters on rails, they can create much more complicated and emotionally effective storylines. The end to FFX gave me a lump in my throat.* I’ve never had that experience in a true RPG before, and I think that if FFX had been a real RPG, they wouldn’t have been able to achieve that sort of emotional peak.
*Luckily, the biopsy said it was benign.
I’d like to nominate Final Fantasy X-2 for the stupidest video game concept ever. If you don’t talk to certain people or do certain things in exact order you can’t get 100% complete and have to start the whole game over again to see the “special” ending. Grr. Square/Enix I want to be paid for all the time I’ll waste playing this game over!