Walking into Erana’s Peace for the first time in Quest for Glory 1 (1989). For a more recent example, walking or driving into safety with a massive load in Death Stranding, as well as most of the rest of the game.
I hate when folks ask for this and assholes say “people will just use this to save scum, don’t cheat.” As if working adults with children should be able to dedicate a whole hour totally uninterrupted.
Also, who cares? It’s your game; play it however you like. I mean, isn’t the whole reason why people play video games is to have fun? If save scumming is your idea of fun, I say scum away.
The problem being that a lot of people don’t actually know what it is that will make them happy. Winning is good, right? Yeah, but not if it’s too easy. Being to save the game state at any point makes a lot of games much too easy to be any fun. And while you might argue “well just don’t save all the time,” people are also bad at creating their own handicaps to increase fun.
Yes, there are exceptions to every generalization (see: OSRS Ultimate Ironman) but by and large there’s a reason why the most popular kind of games are set up the way they are.
You ever play Monopoly Go? Straight-up not fun because it’s basically impossible to lose.
Winning is good, right? Yeah, but not if it’s too easy
That’s how you feel about it, though, not an objective thing everybody feels the same about. I absolutely cheat whenever I’m finding a game too difficult, and I assure you, I’m still enjoying the game. I don’t know what people get out of what I find to be the extremely infuriating act of repeatedly failing over and over until I finally get it right, but I have not ever felt the sense of accomplishment I’m told I should feel after finally beating something I struggled with. I feel angry and like I wasted a bunch of time when I could have been enjoying something more fun.
I’m just trying to have a good time, not compete with myself or prove that I can learn just the right way and right time to hit certain button combos or whatever.
The too-easy levels of notfun are very far away from the too-hard levels of notfun.
Different games are for different styles of fun and for different people. Heck, some games are more like walk-through stories than actual games. If the game is too hard for you to enjoy, then that game just isn’t for you, that’s all. Let other people have their difficult games and find a different one to enjoy. When I played Monopoly Go and found it boringly easy, I didn’t complain that they should make it harder so I could enjoy it, I just recognized that I wasn’t the kind of player they were targeting and found something else to play.
These are subjective statements though and different people want different things. And difficulty variation can broaden the audience while not really changing the game. Sometimes I love a fight. Sometimes I want a story. Sometimes I want to couch coop with my youngest kid and he struggles with some games that he otherwise loves (looking at you Cuphead) that an easier mode would totally fix. And he absolutely loves Sonic, but the originals would be unplayable for him if not for modern saving and non permadeath. Or emulation with save states and cheat codes.
Why are you trying to convince people that if a game is too difficult or long periods between saving doesn’t work for them then it is their fault and not that of the game design. That’s a weird stance to take. If someone designed a car that was generally very nice but with the gear shift next to the passenger seat door, would you say that is just a car for people with super long arms or would you say that was a poor design choice that is going to massively limit an otherwise nice car?
This is more like you complaining that some cars don’t come with automatic transmission options. Sorry buddy, some of us like sports cars and having an automatic transmission option would devalue the very concept of what that particular car is.
I still haven’t beaten Super Mario Brothers. I’ve gotten very close, but I choked on the final Bowser multiple times. I’m not mad at Nintendo for that. I’m not even mad at myself for that. I had loads of fun playing Super Mario Brothers and being able to save would lower the value of the game.
I don’t understand why you’re insistent that all games need to cater to your desired difficulty level. Some games are made for you, some games are made for other people. Chasing the widest audience possible is how you end up with bland art, be it games, movies, social media platforms, or any other thing people enjoy.
Look, you said it yourself. Different people want different things, and what some people want is fundamentally incompatible with what you want. So, you get a different set of games than they get.
This seems to act like games and their default difficulty options are commandments carved in stone when they’re not. If I find a game to difficulty to enjoy and then find it enjoyable by cheating, that’s what I’m gonna do.
I know what will make me happy and it’s not being forced to sit for a full hour through a rogue like just because of whiny goobers complaining to the devs so they don’t implement save and quit.
I got yelled at for saying this on a reddit thread about emotional moments in video games. But I still feel bad for killing Mordin in ME3. I cried. And regret it.
The little mermaid side story was sad. Then, I spent the entire second act just grinding along to get the best character in my party back only to end up super depressed about it when that didn't happen.
As Adol: Climbing down Gens d’Armes to finally meet Dana, Eternia sitting in the distance.
spoilerAdol and Dana having a little heart to heart before the final dungeon, hoping that maybe destiny isn’t real just this one time, and she isn’t fated to die soon.
The scripting in the true final boss, with the dawn breaking over an endless field of water, as the introduction ends and the fight begins.
spoilerFighting through gods and spirits to bring Dana back one last time, to say farewell.
As Dana: White Memory. God. Making peace with Olga, and having her finally open her heart to you as a dear friend, a message from beyond the grave. Watching the last sparks of your civilisation die out in an apocalyptic winter. Valley of Kings, learning that you’re the first person to break a divine apocalyptic cycle, but still bound by fate.
I legitimately couldn’t enjoy video games for two weeks after I finished Ys VIII. I still get really emotional thinking about it.
But it’s nothing compared to FFXI, my favourite game of all time:
Chains of Promathia is incredible from start to finish. Weathering the emotional assault of death beyond death and the decay of the spirit in the Promyvions, this horrible, haunting, gloomy drone in the background; and then immediately being taken to this place of both incredible healing beauty and immediate and poignant, human sorrow.
Witnessing the exact moment where a dear companion begins to waver if he’s on the right path with you, and seeing his doubts culminate in fighting you, to the death if need be. Seeing the guilt, shame and lingering doubt when you win… and forgive him.
Seeing the god of regeneration send a little glimmer over the view of a fallen kingdom, which you’ve probably sat and stared at with strangely passive wraith enemies. The entire Distant Worlds song and cinematic as a whole, closing out a musical and narrative theme that had been developing over three years. Definitely another storyline where I had to sit and just process it for a bit. Took me a year to come around on Aht Urhgan since I did it the day after Promathia.
Seeing the ghost of a city-state wiped out by genocide, brought back into a state of undeath by a god of war and chaos, sacrifice himself to save the heritor of the empire that claimed his city. The music for the fight that follows right after, Ragnarok.
The sadness that makes your heart sink, of wandering the Shadowreign era of Vana’diel, seeing a world ravaged by war, hearing Flowers On The Battlefield add an incredible, keening aura of melancholy everywhere, albeit with little glimmers of peace… broken by the drums of war as battle rages once more.
The end of Adoulin, Forever Today. Closing the book on one of your most personal adventures, alongside some of the most brilliant and heroic characters. The sense of finality mixed with renewal, with musical callbacks to the Theme of Final Fantasy and the Prelude.
Rhapsodies of Vana’diel, especially the ending. Seeing the bravery of an old friend’s daughter sacrifice herself again and again as the cosmos rejects her presence in the past. Building a relationship with a character just as sincere and brilliant as her father. Her final monologue to you: “Master, this is not ‘Farewell.’ It is ‘See you soon.’ Until our paths cross once more, the blessing of Phoenix is yours to wield. And I will be with you, always.”
The beautiful poem being sung as this all happens, leading into the Adventurers’ Chorus of over a hundred actual players from across the world, singing the title music from the first release of the game…
I remember the first time I cried because of the events of a video game.
Final Fantasy 7. Aerith’s death scene.
Up to that point, you’re given several romance options between her and Tifa and I basically friend-zoned Tifa and was pursuing Aerith. So when Sephiroth murders her out of nowhere, it was like he really murdered my girlfriend. FWIW, the game came out when I was 12 and I was probably 13 or 14 when I actually got to own a copy and play through the whole thing.
The most latest game, tho, that hits hard is Cyberpunk 2077. The overall main plot is just a mashup of cyberpunk films like Johnny Mnemonic, Strange Days, 6th Day, 5th Element, Dredd, etc; but the side stories with the main characters are where the real beauty lies. Shit had me choked up like every time there was a lengthy bit of dialogue. The reason your character is dying might be goofy, but the way they portray someone who knows they are going to die is pretty fucking good. And the unique thing is that it’s you. Your own character, not some other character you’re just meant to empathize with.
MyHouse.wad. It’s astonishing that a fucking Doom level can do better environmental storytelling than most modern games. Don’t read much about it, just download it and play!
I also played Life is Strange: True Colors with my daughter and she was amazed at how a video game can just influence our emotions.
MyHouse.wad is definitely one of the better gaming moments from recent years. It reminded me a lot of imscared, and I’d consider that game to be secured in the top 100 games of all time. The environmental storytelling is top tier, and the natural unsettling nature is just great.
Life is Strange is also a great one. My little sister loves the series far more than me, but I also played Fahrenheit and The Walking Dead early in life, so I’d say I had high standards for those games. Would you say True Colors is worth checking out to someone that was lukewarm on the original? I love the style of game, but I’m not invested in the characters so it’d practically be my first introduction to the universe yk?
True Colors is great. It’s a little bit more personal and smaller in scope than the first two. For myself the first one is still my favourite with True Colors as a close second. If you were annoyed by the teenage drama of the first one then you should like True Colors more.
But if you’re looking for traditional adventure puzzles you will be disappointed. There are barely any in this game. It’s a more or less linear story where your relationships are more important than solving the mystery.
Yeah the teenage drama was what took me out of it. I don’t need super good puzzles, The Walking Dead season 1 had the most ass puzzles I’ve ever played but it’s still one of the greatest stories I’ve ever played. Even with the objectively shitty gameplay of TWD, I got so fucking invested in those characters. I felt Clementine’s pain during the ending of season 1 and 2, that was close to being my pick. Thank you for the recommendation!
The hilarious thing about My house.wad is that if you go in without knowing anything about it there's a relatively high chance you just complete the level normally and think "that's it? weird that had so much hype"
First-person shooters, the way they were made in the 6th and 7th gens. A campaign, probably co-op, probably with split-screen or LAN, with some versus multiplayer that repurposed some slightly-remixed locations from the campaign that you can play with approximately 4-8 players. That's all you need. Sometimes we still get some great FPS campaigns, like Half-Life: Alyx, but I haven't really gotten the kind of co-op or versus multiplayer I've been looking for for over a decade. Not everything needs to be a live service. It can be a flash in the pan multiplayer that's so good that you break it out when you have a few friends over or in a Discord call. Not every multiplayer FPS needs to be an e-sport with an online population of tens of thousands of players to matchmake with in ranked.
I also don't really get racing games for me anymore. Star Wars: Episode One Racer, Burnout Revenge, and F-Zero GX truly spoke to me, and there were a few others that were close, but for the most part, if your racing game isn't basically Mario Kart or full of real licensed cars in real places, it doesn't get made. And the ones that aren't Mario Kart don't usually get split-screen multiplayer either, which is a must-have for me. I did get Trail Out in the recent past, which is very good, and there's that game Aero GPX on the horizon to potentially give me my F-Zero fix, but the actual racing games I'm looking for are so few and far between.
Fortunately, this list used to be much longer, and all the other holdouts, like Advance Wars-esque tactics games, Resident Evil 1-esque survival horror games, Commandos-esque stealth tactics games, and a few others have all gotten their itches scratched.
But that was when shooters were getting worse the fastest. It's when we started getting chest-high walls everywhere, regenerating health, auto aim, and a general slow down of the action.
I mean, a lot of my favorites were slower than Quake for sure. Faster isn't automatically better. Regenerating health was preferable to health packs, but we also had the likes of Doom 2016 to show that it didn't have to just be one or the other. Games like Halo 2 and 3, Call of Duty 2, 4, and Modern Warfare 2 (the first time), the Timesplitters games, the 007 games of that era (Agent Under Fire with moon gravity and Q Claw is some of the most fun you'll have with three friends on the same couch), Half-Life 2 and its episodes, Crysis, Left 4 Dead 1 and 2; and getting into third person shooters that were of a similar design philosophy, Metal Arms, Gears of War 1-3, and the much better Star Wars Battlefronts than the ones EA put out with basically the same titles.
As for the antigrav racers you mentioned, have you checked out BallisticNG? It leans more towards Wipeout than F-Zero, but even as a huge GX fan (and looking forward to Aero GPX myself) I’ve really enjoyed it. I believe it does have splitscreen as well, though I haven’t tried it personally.
It’s got a variety of speed settings that increase in difficulty, and it absolutely gets fast enough for anyone lol. I like it a lot more than the actual wipeout games I’ve tried even though its mechanics are more styled after that.
I love simple controls or an elegant way to control simply. For example using one thumb to control two buttons simultaneously or the Super Mario Run control scheme where you only press on the touch screen, doesn’t matter where, and that’s it.
I hate it when in co-op game the other player’s actions can screw up the game e.g. moving the screen too far so the other player dies.
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Aktywne