Playable" cut scenes. I’m looking at you, God of War II. You’ll be chugging along and then you hit this cut scene and a large circle appears on the screen, so you push the circle button, a few seconds later a square appears and you press the square button. etc. I hate that crap. Dragon’s Lair came out 25 freakin’ years ago, you would think that the technology would have advanced past Simon says type controls.
The amazing thing about EVE is that other people can be logged into the game even when you’re not!
I shouldn’t snark, but EVE is a persistent world, and does a better job at this than just about any other MMO. Stuff keeps happening while you’re offline. Missions are based off the actual clock, not your hours played. If that’s not your thing, that’s not your thing, of course.
And of course the developer wants you to dedicate your life to the game. He wants you to keep giving him money. It is a subscription-based MMO, after all.
The new ones. It just feels too big in my hands.
(…that’s what she said.)
Sure, but it wasn’t even through the tutorial bit. It was a random go-fetch mission. Would have had absolutely no impact on anyone else.
Now, if it had actually looked like an original game I might have fun with, and not a 3D version of Escape Velocity (a game I already own and don’t need to pay for every month, and actally like), then maybe I’d have given it a pass. Now? Not so much.
Since what you pay is not based on hours played, he shouldn’t care one way or the other about timed missions. In fact, from that point of view, he should encourage me to play as little as possible, since that would improve the game performance for everyone else.
The skills system also tracks by real time instead of hours played, and that’s where they get you. Missions can usually be done in 10 minutes, but the skills can take weeks or months to train. There was a point when I was playing EVE where I didn’t log in for a month, came back, checked my skills, set another long-term one, and logged off. That’s when I realized I wasn’t actually playing the game and need to stop my subscription, but I’ll wager there’s a ton of people who go on happily letting their skills train up but never really playing the game.
Anyway, I’ll let it go since we’re getting far afield of the OP.
Thousand Year Door could use that. There are two reeeeeally long cutscenes that are part of the final battle. A battle that took me three attempts to finish. THe first time it was annoying but understandable. The next two they were tedious.
I have a funny story to tell about this. Back in high school, when the first N64 Zelda game came out, my best friend was playing through it. When he got to the fire level, where you slowly lose life from burning unless you have a fire suit, he didn’t realize that he could get a fire suit; he just thought that that level was hard, and you had to run fast whenever you were in a fiery room (not all the rooms burned your life away). Most people would realize that it was a little too hard, and there must be an easier way. But he was just too hardcore.
It turns out that once you beat that level, you can’t get the fire suit any more. And you pretty much have to have it at the end of the game.
I can’t stand the latest trend of QTEs (Quick Time Events). You know, the symbol for a button pops up on-screen, and you’re supposed to press that button within *x *milliseconds or YOU FAIL. I don’t know what it is, but I just can’t do it.
I fought all the way through God of War 2, right up to the very last fight. Up pops a QTE, and if you fail, you die. If you die, you get to go through the previous fight and the resultant cutscene all over.
I tried it about ten times, couldn’t do it, and so I couldn’t finish the damn game. Man, I hate those things.
My worst example of this was in Temple of Elemental Evil, a deeply flawed game that I enjoyed the hell out of. At some point, my low-level party stumbled into an encounter intended for 6th-level characters or thereabouts, a wandering encounter. “Crap,” I thought, and hit the quickload button.
Just kidding! F5 was the quickload button. F6, which I actually hit, was the quicksave button. The last time I’d saved a game manually was near the beginning of the game; I’d just saved over my chance of getting out of the scene alive.
Determined not to lose all my playtime, I fought that battle must’ve been like 30 times. Each time I caught a lucky break, I saved the game (manually, in a new file); each time I was hit, I reloaded and tried again, sometimes trying a slightly different strategy.
It sucked, but eventually I made it out of the morass.
So my pet peeve: either quicksave and quickload buttons right next to each other, or quicksaves that don’t use multiple slots for the quicksave to avoid such disasters.
Daniel
Alone In The Dark let you save anywhere at anytime. I enjoyed the hell out of it and replayed many times. AITD2 let you save any time, but I can’t find a copy without a bug in it. AITD3 let you save any time. I loved it and replayed many times.
AITD New Nightmare only let you save with amulets of saving, and respawns all the monsters in the room when you save. I played through once. I never even played the included alternate game.
I have OCD. I like to see how well I can beat a monster. I don’t save during combat. But I thoroughly enjoy seeing how well I can do in each combat. That time the mad scientist got me for 10 life points. Can I get through for less?
Jumping puzzles are my big one. I did all the jumping puzzles I’ll ever want to when I played Megaman. It’s been done.
The whole saving point thing killed Oni for me.
That’s cool. I’m not trying to argue either.
I remember the old two-button Nintendo controller. It was perfect. Two buttons, and it fit my kid-sized hands. Perfect controller for 2D games. Then came the Super Nintendo and I also thought the same thing about the buttons. Those fears quickly went away with some familiarity.
The Xbox 360 controller has 8 buttons (10 if you click in the thumbsticks; 11 if you count the guide button), and nothing you have to reach for. Everything is perfect and where you want it to be. It rumbles, it’s wireless, it’s perfect for first-person shooters, and it even has a directional pad for times in which it’s needed.
Now, if you’re talking about the original Xbox controller…the big one, then yeah. That controller was a little clunky. The smaller controller was perfect and the design continued over into the 360.
Having played once with the Xbox 360 controller I would agree that it’s pretty nifty, and making it wireless and rechargeable was a stroke of genius.
My pet peeve is unskippable cut scenes. It’s bad enough that a game has them at all, but often the designer of the game makes it so that they don’t get in the way of enjoying the game (such as putting them in places where you’re not likely to have to repeat them). Soul Reaver 2 springs to mind as a game with fairly lengthy, full of exposition cut scenes that couldn’t be skipped but you were never in danger of being forced to watch twice because you died or something (due to the placing of scenes and save points). However some other games don’t do this, and you’re stuck watching a movie for the bazzilionth time because you can’t beat the boss. Fuck that for a game of soldiers.
My other one is games that have puzzles in that have really obscure solutions to them. I’m currently playing Zelda a Link to the Past (thanks Virtual Console!) and I had to look up a game FAQ because I had no idea how I was supposed to get the second amulet (and this is right at the beginning of the game!). The answer? You need to get a book. This bears no relation to anything you’re told and if there were any hints to this effect I didn’t encounter them. Thanks for nothing Nintendo (admittedly it’s a bit of a bad example as the game is 15 years old).
I did that once with Max Paine. The blood litteraly drained from my body. I was stuck with virtually no ammo, half health, and a rocket launcher.
Fortunately, the enemies couldn’t aim, so I got through it in 15 tries or so.
I hate this generally too, but I love A Link to the Past. I had it when I was a very little kid, and for some reason, I hadn’t learned impatience then. I just kept playing and playing and playing, al through the weird puzzles.
BTW, I figured out the book thing from two clues.
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That book lying on the library shelf just screamed “you’ll need this at some point.” Tried for ages to get it down. I think my dad eventually figured it out.
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When you try to read the entrance stone, it says you don’t understand the words. Words you don’t understand=Dictionary=Book from the library.
For me, it’s this sequence:
[ol][li]Save point.[/li][li]Lengthy unskippable cut scene.[/li][li]Boss battle.[/ol][/li]Why? For the love of God, how does this get through even the first round of play-testing?
That’s the best story ever.
I have to fifth (sixth?) the whole unskippable cut scene followed by a hard boss fight thing. I swear I know the lines before Malificent turns into a dragon by heart now.
I don’t really understand that “too many buttons” comment. It’s got basically the exact same scheme as the PS2 and PS3 controllers. I suppose if you are used to a Nintendo 64 controller or a PSP it might feel like alot, but it’s pretty much standard. The Wii has fewer, but the aspect and motion sensors are the equivalent to at least a couple thumbsticks.
For the record, I loved the original, big Xbox controller. I always found the PS2’s controller far to small and compact for my big hands. When people had the smaller 2nd gen Xbox controllers I found them too small. I like the Xbox 360 controller because it seems to fall somewhere in between those two sizes with a little added heft and wireless.
I did QA for a game that had an unskippable cutscene right before a difficult boss battle. We bugged it. They tried to defer. We argued that it was impeding our testing efforts, so they made the cutscene skippable. Then, right before release, they made it unskippable again. Apparently, they were really, really proud of that cutscene, and were bound and determined to make sure you appreciated it as much as humanly possible. And then some.
Want to know something pathetic? My wife and I just played this and we got the suit, but didn’t realize what it did. We tried like crazy to beat the fire level, but eventually had to find a cheat.
Later, when reading a guide, I pointed the solution of “equipping the fire suit” to my wife.
We both :smack: at the same time.