Luigi’s Mansion 3. At least if you consider 6 years ago recent. It got some really good reviews at the time, and it honestly makes me wonder if we were playing the same game. I loved the first one, by the way - I got an A rank while also getting golden frames on all the portraits (on the PAL version where you need more money).
I only persisted with the game because it was a birthday gift (and due to the sunk cost fallacy, I suppose), but I think it might be the game I’ve completed that I enjoyed the least. It looks nice, and some of the boss ghost encounters were charming, but the gameplay itself was fairly monotonous since they simplified the ghost catching mechanics from LM1 (I didn’t really play LM2, since it was on 3DS). Gooigi would have been a decent addition, but his puzzles generally just didn’t feel very fleshed out. It felt like they were either “I need two vacuums” or “I can’t fit through this grate”.
Also, I think Nintendo took the criticism that the first game was too short well and truly to heart, because LM3 might be the most filler-stuffed game I’ve ever played. Half the time when you get an elevator button, you get screwed over in some way and have to find it again. And don’t get me started on fucking Poulterkitty, when that little bastard showed up for the second time I legitimately thought about quitting the game there and then. The final boss was awful, too, which left an even more bitter taste in my mouth.
Luigi’s Mansion 3 might be the only game I’ve ever played where I thought “Thank god I don’t have to play that anymore” once I finished it.
I thought the gameplay was pretty good, in a “turn your brain off and shoot guys with gradually increasing numbers” kind if way, and I absolutely adored whenever Handsome Jack showed up, but that’s pretty much it
I’ve heard from more than a few sources that the shooting on that game’s peak, but it’s just kind of generic. Outside of Jack, I thought the writing was honestly pretty lacklustre as well, even getting annoying in more than one instance (CATCH A RIIIIIDE FUCK OFF DIPSHIT). The cell-shaded artsyle is quite pretty, I will give it that
Did you play it solo or with people? I found the game to be fairly dull solo. It was better with people but the loot system still allowed a lot to be desired especially if you played with greedy people.
I get tired pretty quick of games where the multiplayer aspect is considered important to enjoying the game. If your friends are with you, you can enjoy literally sitting in the dirt doing basically nothing, just chatting. If your game requires me to also drag friends into it like some cultist, just to make it pass the bar into ‘fun’ then the game is a failure, plain and simple. They don’t get credit for the fun I brought with me to the show I paid for.
Graphics are great. Hardware requirements are low, but there are bugs that accumulate with more play time. Learning curve is infinite and permadeath is only option despite a bunch of claims to mod/patch it. PVP is broken, constant spawn camping and pay to play behavior. Microtransactions are a pain. Huge variety of mission types, yet it still ends up feeling like a bunch of fetch quests sometimes. Side quests are the way to go, the main campaign is not super rewarding
Side quests are the way to go, the main campaign is not super rewarding
The worst part is that you’re forced to spend at least 1/3 of your time playing grinding out the main campaign. Then you are highly incentivised to spend another 1/3 of your time in game not playing due to the rest mechanic. That only leaves 1/3 of your time in game for any other tasks, including extra preparation for the main quest. Not to mention the fatigue system which often leaves you unable to do side quests when you have the opportunity.
I’m glad I didn’t roll any of the classes with extra lives, to be honest.
I thought about GameHub when having trouble with Winlator. Read an article titled something like “I installed GameHub so you don’t have to.” Happy to hear there’s a less intrusive alternative!
a) I can see why a company like this would bake in invasive permissions and telemetry, and b) They did so. They have a wonderful product. One interesting thing though is that each time GameHub Lite releases an update, pointing out the shadiness of some of GameHub’s ideas…the next official GameHub update makes the product better and less of a privacy nightmare.
It’s an odd situation, but like you said, at least we have options!
I have been going down the rabbit hole of overclocking and undervolting Nintendo Switch. So the games I have been playing are Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Ninja Gaiden (2004). Thanks to overclocking, the former runs at stable 40 FPS, the latter of course doesn’t need any.
Ah. I guess of the Sigmas it’s the least offensive version. It’s a shame still though as NGB is the perfect version. But yeah I momentarily forgot about it being an Xbox exclusive.
The entire Mass Effect series. Many of the missions were dredging through mostly empty buildings that had copy-pasted boxes and random shit in them. Just generic buildings with generic crap stuffed into them. The world felt purposeless, sterile, and generic to me.
Also, the story just didn’t really grab me that much as I cringe at the romance parts of any story. And lastly, the gameplay was just clunky and awkward to me.
I love the series, but I played the games when they came out. It’s true that the level design of ML2 suffers from it being a cover shooter and ML1 is very dated now.
Which of the three titles did you hate most/represents your dislike best?
Still grinding that World of Warcraft: Legion Remix. New phase started this week, along with the next raid. I’ve been playing so much the last couple of weeks, that it’s definitely getting stale, but I’ve been saying the same thing for a few weeks already, and I’m still playing, albeit a bit less.
Being on the patient side of things, two games I’ve played in recent years and didn’t enjoy were:
God of War (2018) - it just felt like AAA slop to me. Meaningles upgrades, tons of obvious puzzles at any corner - never throwing in even a single brain teaser, boring combat - the best option was almost always to throw the axe, that thing were you start walking at a snails pace to mask loading and/or play a cutscene and on top of that your god powers being mostly cutscene exclusive. Just your bog standard AAA game with no ‘friction’ - boring.
Factorio - it just feels like work to me. On top of that, going in blind, I just didn’t enjoy building something up just to tear it down again because I’ve unlocked something new changing the requirements. Once again, feels like a job in IT. Also, resource patches being limited just gave me the weirdest kind of anxiety despite never actually seeing one run out.
Factorio’s the awakening for a lot of people on certain ends on the spectrum. My AuDHD makes it crack for me. I will say though, while the tutorial teaches you some essentials, it just throws you into the deep end once you start a real game.
I only discovered all the tips and quality of life from videos online, and there are some troubles in the game you can solve on your own but good fucking luck (belt balancing).
Might not be your kinda game, but if you ever feel like giving it another chance, check out some vids online for beginner tips (: It’s a game about stimulating the Eureka! part of our ooga booga caveman brains and it feels amazing.
I feel vindicated. I have the exact same feeling of factorio feeling too much like work, having to refactor everything because the requirements change is one of the more frustrating parts of software engineering imo, and the game feels tailored specifically to invoke that frustration.
I imagine that part gets better after the first hundred hours where you basically know what’s coming. I don’t have the patience to learn the tech tree though, given that I don’t even enjoy the game.
Yeah I’ve seen people try to balance things perfectly in factorio, but my strat is always to overproduce and let belts getting backed up balance out the throughput.
Yeah same. I’ve seen other people stockpile intermediate resources to try and smooth out bottlenecks, but I think that’s wasteful. Build extra throughout, and have as little product sitting there as possible.
I’m fuzzy on the details, but it went something like this:
I set up long resource lines of coal, copper and iron.
I needed a thing#1 and built a neat little package to build it, exactly to order and on minimal space.
I copy pasted that design 10 times left to right along my resource belt line.
Then thing#2 came along. Needed the same stuff and combined with thing#1 into thing#3. So I wrapped my resource belts, designed a second package on minimal space and also copy pasted it 10 times. So I had pairs of thing#1 and thing#2 with a line in the middle to combine them and a belt to collect them. Worked nicely.
Then:
Coal was replaced by electricity. I had no space for powerlines.
I got other types of the grab thingies, potentially simplifying my setup.
Suddenly I got sorting, making my belt setup a waste of space (I had one line per thing/resource).
All belts needed to be replaced by better belts.
Oh and:
Thing#4 came along, needing 2 of thing#1 and one thing#2 with some additional resources. Since I built to order, I basically had to start from scratch or severly hamper the production of thing#3. Also, my packages didn’t work anymore without wasting space and/or entirely fucking up resource belt management.
Therefore, I designed stuff from scratch to fit the new requirements.
That’s from the very beginning, but after repeating this pattern a few times, I gave up. Building it non-optimized felt even worse.
Interesting. Optimizing the factory for your immediate current needs sounds very tedious, because those needs change all the time. I instead optimize for expandability and adaptability. The factory game genre isn’t for everyone, but if you are interested in some tips:
My solution is usually something like:
really long line of basic resources (usually a belt of smelted copper and a belt of smelted iron, eventually adding more stuff and adding more belts of iron and copper as supplies are needed)
when I need thing 1, I make a little package that builds it, drawing resources from the line with splitters so the excess can continue down the line
thing 2 is an independent little package farther down the line
When it’s time for thing 3, I build copies of the packages for building thing 1 and thing 2 as necessary to feed the construction of thing 3, again as separate feeds splitting off the main resource line
when it’s time for thing 4, its again independent of the production of things 1-3, except they are splitting off the same main resource belt
If the resources on the main belt are insufficient to feed all of those machines, one of three things needs to happen: 1. Add more raw resource processing until your belt is full and backed up at the beginning 2. If that’s not enough, upgrade the belt 3. If you don’t have a belt upgrade available, build another main resource line and use splitters to rebalance it onto the main line
This construction allows for easy expansion without having to destroy anything. I typically don’t disassemble anything unless it’s actually a problem for some reason or I need the space. This is especially important because you often need some basic components like the level 1 belts even into the late game.
Also, once you unlock robots, you can literally copy-paste, just select an area to upgrade all belts/arms/etc. in, and a lot of other neat tricks that drastically speed things up.
And one last peace of advice: Overproduce everything and let belts backing up balance out the resource distribution. Then if you discover that belts that previously were backed up are now sparse, figure out why and optimize it, usually by adding more production of whatever the missing resource is.
Ultimately throughput is all that matters. Loss of throughput because you don’t need something isn’t wasteful. Loss of throughput because you aren’t producing enough of something is a problem to solve. Things that don’t affect throughput don’t matter and aren’t wasteful.
I played pretty much the same way De_Narm did. I tried caring less, though because I had no idea what would come next, it inevitably descended into spaghetti. I am stressed out about technical debt enough at work to be playing a technical debt simulator lol.
Dedicating the space needed to expand, ensuring everything you build is scalable, inevitably requires you to know a lot about what’s coming.
Yeah, if you know what you’re doing you can avoid these issues. I did not enjoy myself in the slightest, so after some hours of giving it a chance I decided that learning how to avoid these issues was not worth the pain. I’ll just stick to work instead.
Elden ring. Repetitive, ugly, boring. I don’t think I made it past the wasteland you start in but I never saw anything worth seeing and the dying over and over gameplay is frustrating for me, not fun. I played for a couple of hours and just gave up on it, i saw no progress or any story, just repetitive killing
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