I think Celeste is designed to be a super narrow experience - pure platforming. I found it pretty pleasant, but not what I’m generally looking to play. I personally don’t think it’s overhyped - the platforming design and movement is really very excellent. Having said that, not my cup of tea either.
Even if I enjoyed it, which I found it impossibly boring, I can’t even begin to wrap my head around favorite of the DECADE. In 10 whole years you haven’t played a single game that you enjoyed more than a simplified platformer? Mind blowing.
Nothing at all my friend, I LOVE 2D platformers. Mario World is one of my favorite games. But I don’t know, they don’t hit me in the feels like something like Fallout New Vegas or Metal Great Solid. Celeste just wasn’t nearly enough content to be better than everything else from the last 10 years IMO.
Ubisoft style open world games. I honestly know I’m not built to enjoy them but I convinced myself to try and finish Horizon Zero Dawn and it was a huge mistake.
For a single player game, it vigorously wastes your time. The entire game is based around crafting but each time you need to gather something you need to come to a full stop, and spend a second watching the interact meter fill before you can gather each thing you see in the overworld.
The talent trees either contain things that are not meaningfully impactful on the core experience, ie tons of talents are slightly dressed up raw damage increases. Or they are things that are meaningful, but not surprising such as silent takedowns or bullet time. Overall it feels like Aloy was designed to be kind of fun and then they hamstrung her in a bunch of different ways to give a reason for the talent system to exist, and it takes the runtime of the whole game to undo this.
Many quests do not have anything to say about the lore or characterization of the world, whether it be for individual characters or the world overall.
Same here re: Ubisoft cookie cutter open worlds. I LOVED the first ~40 hours of Immortals and thought I was approaching the end until I realized I was less than halfway at the rate I was progressing. I have no idea how length estimates like the ones on How Long to Beat are accurate for this game; usually they’re pretty spot on for my “complete what I find fun and interesting and not much else” play style. I gave up on the game after briefly skimming FAQs to see what I had left.
Street Fighter 1 is an interesting case of an historically extremely important game, that just wasn’t very good. Which in turn explains why it was largely forgotten and completely overshadowed by its sequel. While it invented most of the conventions for the fighting game genre, it implemented them all in a really clunky way. Special moves can’t be triggered with any kind of reliability, jumps don’t even follow a smooth arc but just jerk around and the thing is a button masher, due to originally not having the six-button layout of the sequel, but two huge buttons that would register how hard you pushed them. It’s barely even a functioning game by modern standards, yet it is the birthplace of a franchise that lasts to this day. It’s fascinating seeing all the elements from later fighting game on display in such a rough shape.
This is so true. I bought the anniversary collection years ago. When I went to play SF1 I was flabbergasted. It’s legitimately terrible. Even by standards back then. Though, as someone who is a bit obsessed currently, I am so glad they kept up with it.
That’s all the FromSoft games to be fair. I’m forcing myself to finish Dark Souls one for the first time right now and straight up? I fucking hate this game.
Curious why you're forcing yourself to finish a game you don't like. I usually drop at this point, because I play games for fun. Are you a completionist who'll get some satisfaction when it's all done, or someone who has to write a gaming review? I realize my tone seems judgmental but I'm really just curious and am not sure how to better word my post to come off as less judgmental.
Sort of the completionist thing, it’s just one of those games people rant and rave about, so I want to have the experience. I also rode every roller coaster in a very popular amusement park just so I could say I have done it and will never again. I’m a crazy person.
As soon as I saw it’s locked at 30fps, it immediately killed any amount of interest I had in playing it. All the power to people who can stomach action games at what feels like a slide-deck input response.
This game has been the bane of my existence. I love the atmosphere, story, and design of Bloodborne. I cannot get myself to enjoy the game. I want to like it so badly because everything other than the mechanics are extremely my-interests, but FUCK do I not like the gameplay.
I began playing it after so much praise from all over the place and it just uses predatory tactics to hook the gamer. I only had fun with the game for maybe a day or so but overall clocked in many more hours of hate-playing. The only good thing is that the developer (who's background is developing gambling games) does not use those tactics for microtransactions.
Once I deleted the game, I was never even tempted to go back.
Really? I guess you could consider the game’s visual flair to be predatory that way but I always felt that stuff was a joke because it doesn’t have microtransactions
Predatory usually implies that you’re being lured in to buy something, but the game has no microtransactions. At its worst the mobile version (which is free) has the option to watch an ad to get 1 revive per run. Don’t watch the ad? The game is the same as the console/PC version.
I think the lights, sounds, slaughtering massive hordes of enemies with overwhelming damage, and constant dopamine rush from them could certainly be predatory in nature if they were used to bait you into buying microtransactions, but that’s not the case here. I see where they’re coming from, but I can’t necessarily agree.
What’s the difference between predatory tactics to hook people into a game, and “normal” gameplay, whatever that is? If neither cost any money or have microtransactions in any way?
Is Diablo 2 using predatory mechanics? Is Counter Strike? Is Factorio?
Games are artificial constructs. If you deconstruct them entirely, unless they got some story to tell as the center point of the game, their mechanics and goals are entirely artificial and constructed to get you to keep playing, be engaged, and have fun, whatever that means and implies.
Because, well, in the end, games do not have a grand purpose. Their purpose is entertainment(or be art, but not all games have that goal). And so if vampire survivors keep you engaged and enjoy the game… Is that really that much different to other games? Another example to this are idle/incremental games, as a pure distillation of what games are. Are they predatory? Is there really much difference from the very core of other, more “proper”, games?
A game can offer an experience that leaves the player feeling satisfied or at least content with how they spent their time. There is a large space of possible interactive experiences that extend far beyond the simple dichotomy of fun vs educational or productive.
A game can certainly be considered predatory if it exploits psychological vulnerabilities to hook someone on engaging gameplay that gives the player very little in return in terms of fulfillment or mental recovery. Whether or not it takes the opportunity to swindle the player on top of that is a matter of degree in severity. Wasting a player’s time (or worse, induce stress or other harmful mental states for no good reason) is not a particularly nice thing to do.
Sure, he worked in the sector, but that’s because he couldn’t find better jobs. What you’re implying here is really unfair, especially considering there aren’t even any microtransactions in the game. As far as I know, he just made a game that he felt was fun.
Most of the games of my childhood - they exclusively came from the <$5 bin 🙃 at least we had a PlayStation 2 but Crazy Frog Racer 2, Frogger: The Great Quest, Zathura, Animal Soccer World, and Street Vert Dirt are noteworthy “highlights”.
i’m trying desperately hard to like Haunting Ground for the PS2 (i’m a big horror game fan) but keep being interrupted from puzzles and exploration by each of the ‘stalker’ enemies. for context, they can’t be killed or gotten rid of permanently, you can only run and hide. it’s a shame because otherwise it’s a very fun and unique game.
The one I still remember is Donkey Kong 64. Just a boring collectathon with too much retreading. And it missed the funny writing of previous Rare platformers. Also it had a cringe rap song like every piece of pop media had in the late 90’s even my eleven year old self hated it.
I loved Rare games before that. After that game I stopped buying any Rare games. Probably because Dk64 was the first game I bought with my own money that I saved for a long time. I didn’t even buy Perfect Dark
This game came out pre-Twitter, so I've been surprised to see how many people hated this game. I've revisited it several times since childhood and still enjoy it quite a bit. The different Kong stuff made it feel somewhat like a metroidvania.
For me it was Cyberpunk 2077. Yes there were all those bugs at launch but I did not have too many issues. My main complaint was the story and the characters. The protagonist V was without any compassion, just a loud asshole. I couldn’t empathize at all. I felt like I wasn’t able to make any decisions were I was happy with the outcome. Additionally the gameplay was mediocre at best. A lot of places in the world felt completely rushed and unfinished. Combined with the lies from marketing, I wasn’t hooked at all and felt betrayed.
The protagonist V was without any compassion, just a loud asshole.
Would this not be mostly up to the player, since you control what V says when you pick dialogue options like any other RPG? If you play him without any compassion, of course he will sound that way.
Yes this is true. I wasn’t expecting a happy ending either (I never finished it). But there is no rule, that you can’t be the nice guy in a cyberpunk world. In the end this still is a game which is supposed to entertain the player. I think both blade runner movies are a good example of a cyberpunk story, where love and compassion is a central point to the story.
The advantage of story telling in games over movies is the decision making. The capability to influence the direction a story is headed. My point is, that I wasn’t able to connect with the main character although the game was advertised as an rpg. And I know they acknowledged this flaw as they rebranded the game as action adventure.
Did you play male or female V? A general consensus I hear is that male V makes a better merc while female V acts more like a real person with some compassion
I played a male V and I looked into the differences now. I might have to give the game a second chance and play a female V.
And I’m not gonna have expectations this time arround. So I might be able to enjoy the positive sides.
I see what you mean with the gameplay. Personally I really enjoyed the story and the setting, as well as the level design. But the gameplay wasn’t very great.
MLB: The Show. I used to really enjoy these games because they felt like a sports game that actually cared about making a very realistic simulation while still keeping it fun. Now everything is about Diamond Dynasty, the fantasy baseball mode. All the other modes only reward you by giving you packs and giving you a gentle shove into Diamond Dynasty. One of my favorite modes was “March to October” where you play select innings in select games over the course of a whole season. Each game’s outcome determines your team’s general ability over the season. The better you do, the better you win rate and the higher chance of making it into the post season. Your rewards? Card packs. SMH.
Ghostrunner. The levels were fun and had big Hotline Miami vibes but the boss fights were far too difficult and just utterly boring. Yeah, I really liked wall running in circles for minutes on end because the floor was lava. That was great.
Atomic Heart. Bought it on a whim while high. I liked the bioshock influence and the level design is really cool. It just suffers from being a “survival horror” without the survival or the horror, so most of the gameplay involves you scrounging around for bullets and then dealing ultra light blows to enemies because you ran out of your 3 bullets. Pretty much none of the combat was fun and the stealth was a relentless ultra punishing slog. As a lover of stealth games, please if you’re considering making a stealth game do not take any notes from this game. It did it all wrong.
Dying Light 2. I loved the first game but this game just sorta felt overwhelming in a way? I really don’t know how else to put it. I like open world games but developers just need to calm the fuck down. I don’t need 10 map markers.
The Quarry. I get that it’s supposed to be a rip on teen slasher movies but that still didn’t make it very fun to me. I loved Until Dawn and played it probably 5 times so I was super hyped for this but just really let down. I hated the way the game ended and I hated pretty much every second that I played it.
The Hunter: Call of the Wild. It was just boring. I guess that’s what hunting is like in real life, but so is truck driving and I like truck simulator games…
Agreed. Given how many people are sucked in by dark patterns, I'm very pleased there's a contingent who is actively turned off by them, who refuses to reward that kind of design. I'll let it go in a game that seems otherwise quality, but it does count against you in the "are you an actual game or just freemium/predatory bullshit" assessment.
Destiny 2. I played THE HELL out of Destiny 1, then 2 rolls around and it was like they forgot everything that people liked about 1.
You couldn’t access the story missions from the map, and you couldn’t replay them on demand, you could only play them off a playlist. There was a weekly heroic story mission that gave a powerful engram reward, then they removed the reward and people stopped playing even that. Eventually they removed the story missions entirely “because nobody was playing them”. Big brain move there!
In Destiny 1, each series of missions on a planet ended with a higher level “strike”. So you’d pick the missions off the map based on your light level, then level up to hit the strike, then move on to the missions on the next planet.
In D2, not only could you not see the missions, or what level you were supposed to be, the strikes weren’t present on the map at all, you could only play them on a play list and the play list was randomized. It was also bugged, often delivering the same strike over and over and others not at all, leaving gaps in the storyline and player experience.
They did patch things, like being able to play strikes on demand, then about 1/2 way through the life cycle Bungie decided to just delete 1/2 of the content in the game. New players would come in, have no access to the original story missions, no idea what was going on, and no idea how to proceed without watching a bunch of youtube videos showing the content removed from the game.
For existing players, they decided that people had spent too much time, in some cases hundreds of hours, curating their perfect weapon and armor sets. Rather than create better gear to replace what people loved, they artificially capped old gear to sunset it and force people to “upgrade” to crappier gear that replaced it. They intentionally didn’t make better gear because they were afraid of “power creep” and legitimately “explained” that they no longer knew how to design the game around the old gear. Funny, they didn’t have that problem when it was the ONLY gear.
Maybe it’s better now? I dunno, the way Bungie totally disrespected the time I spent playing and money I spent on expansions, they’ll never get another dime from me.
I played a little bit of Destiny 1. It was fun but I just wasn’t into MMO any more, but it was still fun to dick around solo and maybe group every once in a while. But I got 2 and instantly nothing made any sense and nothing was any fun. I doubt I clocked even 10 hours on the game before putting it down forever.
Good call on this one. I forgot I even played it until your description.
My biggest issue is I just can’t keep up with the monetary demands of that game. Every time I finally had the excess money for an expansion they come out with two more.
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