Super Tux Party
I’m sorry but we need something more modern
Dispatch.
It goes the old telltale way of presenting fake choices that dont really matter because the optional character are being written out of team scenes mostly, one romance option is completely ignored because the devs clearly favoured the other and put her in every scene and the dispatching minigame they advertised the game with has absolutely 0 impact on anything. You could fail every dispatch, only do the mandatory ones and nothing would change.
The Outer Worlds was so bad I had to put the controller down and abandon it. A fan made song got the feeling of “dystopian capitalism in space” better than the actual game did.
And an older one that’ll get me burned at the stake: Fallout New Vegas is the worst of the first person fallout games.
I couldn’t connect with Outer Worlds either. I gave it a good shot but it didn’t give me any new feelings or enjoyment.
New Vegas was one of the best games of its type… for the time. It doesn’t hold up well on a technical level, the side quests are largely less immersive and interesting because our expectations have broadly changed. It was by far the best game I had played… in 2010. A lot has changed in the intervening 15 years and now the game feels small, cramped and limited in scope, to say nothing of how dated the graphics are.
What people are really saying when they hype up New Vegas was how much the story mattered. And how you had actual choices that impacted things, something that is dreadfully absent in modern games that have to play it safe and make sure the player has exactly the experience intended. When was the last time you played a game where you could skip right to the last boss and kill him (or join him!) and then the game goes on and people now know what happened or can learn that you did it? It would be AMAZING with today’s technical advances to have that kind of freedom and involvement with a storyline.
I get that people like the story and feel like they have an influence on it, but for me it felt railroaded even from the start. “Oh yeah it’s open world but if you go anywhere other than the path we laid out for you you’ll die by deathclaws” is what it’s known for.
My biggest gripe is that when I play fallout I want post apocalyptic retro futurism. 50s vision of the future gone wrong. I feel like I don’t get that with NV and that’s the whole theme of the franchise. It’s the pizza at the Chinese buffet, like, I’m not here for that, why are you here? This is just Nevada but slightly shittier.
I mean… sure, I guess it bears mentioning my first playthrough I did brave the deathclaws and survived by being sneaky and took a wildly different path than most people at the time.
The idea isn’t that there’s an easier path of least resistance you can take, but that it actually let’s you go off the rails if you give it effort or come up with some logical ideas.
In modern gaming, solving problems with logic is almost dead, and NV had a lot of that.
Oh really? I did have fun with the Outer Worlds. Nothing too amazing, but it was fun enough to keep me invested. Parvati was also a large reason for that, I loved her character.
With 2 out I thought I’d give the original one more chance. I wish I hadn’t. The story is just as bad as I remember, and the gameplay is somehow worse.
I mean the only way to talk about the story is that you’re better off just running through without thinking about it, because at every level it just fails at its messaging. It simply is what it is. What compounds that suck is that the game isn’t even that well designed of a shooter, or implemented well. The controls are gummy, your character feels weightless, and as someone almost 7 feet tall IRL I still feel like the POV is a foot too high. Guns feel boring, the skill system is unimpactful, dialog is stilted, characters are flat as cardboard, and overall the entire game just feels like you’re meant to squint at it until you forget what you’re doing and just reminisce about playing fallout. All I feel when I play is a distinct fear that I will see the seeds of Outer Worlds in games I loved as a kid before I knew to look for such flaws.
I don’t know if the story is bad, I just don’t care about any of it. Parvati’s story was cute and I liked helping her but I couldn’t tell you anyone else’s name and I was playing it yesterday.
The loot system just feels like it doesn’t matter. Maybe I screwed myself over by doing an INT based build cause my science hammer just demolishes everything.
I wish I could say you did; almost any build works at almost any difficulty. Int is famous for being the most broken stat, though. All you need to beat the entire game is to start with very high int and dex, then grab a hunting rifle.
You’re right BTW, the loot system doesn’t matter at all. Consumables only matter at supernova difficulty, and even then just because you have to manage hunger and thirst. The drug boosts are nice enough in theory but are completely unnecessary for any strategy. Damage types are pretty unnecessary, and beyond Spacers Choice weapons don’t really upgrade enough to be worth switching. Armor is unnecessary on normal, and is essentially wet paper on anything harder. All said, stims are the only thing that matter unless you’re on supernova; if you are, get ready to fill out your inventory with bread and water.
I didn’t think it was so bad I had to stop playing, but I did stop playing one night once it got late and just never started it again, nor had the desire.
It seemed fine enough, but it just didn’t click with me I guess.
Well just fyi. The end missions are currently, still today, broke. So only one ending available that is regardless of whatever choices you made.
I loved the first one. I like this one but they made some bad changes.
But mostly they need to fix the mission bugs.
First one you could change the armor and weapons on the companions.
Also I really liked the vicar and Parvati. Vicar was like a snarky gay guy and I loved it. I will admit the other 3 were blah. But the new companions on OW2 are kinda bland.
I don’t really like any of them. Niles and inza had potential but wasn’t developed.
And I straight up dislike Tristan’s personality. He’s just awful.
Aza can be entertaining. If they made her more impulsive I think that could have been fun.
For instance if you take too long in negotiations and shes present. She just starts attacking people after some time limit.Or randomly attacks strangers she doesn’t like the look of.
They could have done something interesting with her.
But mostly they need to fix the damn quest bugs so I can finish the game.
Also there was a quest in ow1 where some sketchy dude asks you to do some sketchy thing. And you realize this during the quest. You can go back to him and get the reward. Or sucker punch him.
I wanted more of that in ow2. Didn’t get it.
Hot take alert
Hollow knight silksong.Its such a huge letdown for me as a massive fan of Hk… but they did so many things that are just… mean. They disrespect the player constantly… tc actually TROLLS YOU with trick benches n shit. But mainly waste so much of your time with shitty padded content. Fucking fetch quests, timed ‘flower’ quests by the dozen. Most of the primary content ends up being “just like hollow knight, but worse, and now do 10x more of the worse version.” So its unoriginal AND inferior to the source.
I tried so hard to love it and its nothing but frustration in the end.
Paradise Killer.
Amazing soundtrack that is on repeat with the greatest in my playlist, but terrible character design and condescending to the player characters.
Too bad.
Condescending in what way?
The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy - the disrespect for player’s time is actually insane, never seen anything like that before or since. Hundred endings which should have been like 30 tops with a decent quality control. 100 days which should also be 30 tops for each ending.
I really wanted to get to that one cool ending, but you have to play through who knows how many stupid filler routes to unlock it - I just couldn’t do it.
Don’t get me started on the day-to-day in the game: the repetitive slow-ass animations for every day, you having to go through motions to skip every day. And battles… Even when “skipping” them you spend literal minutes. Like why… And so many times you can’t even skip them.
But what really soured everything for me is the final battle in that one ending.
spoiler
That one super climactic battle, where your entire team stands together against the strongest foe yet, without the respawn ability or the healer.
By juggling my squad, I avoided any deaths before accomplishing the goal for the battle. I thought that I would get a cool ending due to me trying hard to keep everyone alive. But then enemies (which constantly respawn) receive a power-up which makes them one shot my guys. Well, ok, I thought, maybe I can save some of them. By using placeable tools and overpowered protagonist, I kept some of my team alive while the timer for the battle went down steadily. Enemies kept spawning, but I kept some of my guys alive. The timer went down to zero, I was relieved, but then apparently that was a lose timer? Apparently, to win you HAVE to get your entire team dead? If you struggle as hard as you can to keep even some of them alive - you insta lose? But then if you win like you were supposed to (by killing your entire squad), the place blows up anyway killing everyone including the protagonist? That is actually insane. How did anyone come up with something like that…
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?
I played through fhe whole series thinking the good part was about to happen since there was hype for the game.
I do wish they’d done more with the buildings.
The structures being carbon-copy was lore, they’re built in factories and dropped from ships.
But that doesn’t mean they all need the same boxes in a row layout internally, some personality would have been great and pretty easy to implement.
Out of curiosity, who did you romance, and why?
No one. Because it’s incredibly cringy.
Nine Sols. Played it right after finishing Silksong to keep the metroidvania kick going.
The parrying was some of the worst feeling parrying I’ve ever felt in any game, the world felt tiny and extremely linear, the narrative was predictable and felt extremely flat, and the final boss is the only time I’ve ever switched to a story mode difficulty in any game just to get it over with, I love difficult games but that difficulty spike is absurd and the game never remotely prepares you for that.
They advertise this game as a Sekiro-like metroidvania, while it feels like they completely miss what made Sekiro work or what a metroidvania is.
I felt that way for the first couple of hours and then the parrying “clicked” with me. Also you get some items/skills that make parrying easier/stronger.
any game that is very short for its cost. plus i saw re6 and its just dragging on the boss battles(like making them very hard to kill) to prolong the game. SWSH to recent pokemon game, knew the slop in the beginning never bought into the future switch games, and it turns it gets worst every game. by the way the gamefreaks ceo said it was going to be SLOP after slop, but people bought it anyways.
For me, it’s borderlands 2
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
At its core, I think it’s just… fine.
I love that game, spent hundreds of hours in it a while back, and don’t remember fuck all about the story.
it’s a shoot 'em up loot game, and it does a great job of it IMO
absolutely a brainded activity though. it and Bioshock are two different frames of mind when you’re playing them
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.
I’d played through about half of it myself years ago, and again fully with a friend recently
Life
Yeah, mid characters except few…
Final Fantasy X.
Lots of people hype the game up, but boy is the gameplay boring to me. I love a good turn-based game, but not turn-based battles.
Especially didnt like Blitz ball. And the story wasn’t good enough for me to keep playing to find out. I played about 20 hours and got to the Seymour Wedding scene, after the desert area. That’s about where I dropped the game.
To be fair, I don’t really like JRPGs that require grinding, especially turn-based games with no tactical movement which require grinding, so I was already not going to like the game. But I had read that the story was one of the best among Final Fantasy. Also super hate random battles, especially when I am just trying to explore somewhere I already feel like I “cleared” out with battles. Also, gigachad Lulu was carrying like the entire time I played. L bozo Waka, your brother hated you bro. Ject would have been a better protagonist than Titus. Better design too.
Honorable Mention: XenoSaga.
My experience with XenoSaga can be summed up with: “When I am in a Designing Horrendous Boss Battles and my competition is The Developers of XenoSaga:”
Final Fantasy X is probably my favorite Final Fantasy of all time. Just don’t play X-2, assume the story ends immediately.
The HD remaster has some “cheats” to smoothen your experience, if you ever want to give it another shot:
- No random battles
- Infinite gil
- All non key items
- invencibily (to make up for low levels)
This way you can enjoy the story and move quickly through the game.
If you don’t enjoy turn based battles nor grinding I think this IP is just not for you. Definitely nothing before Final Fantasy 12. Maybe Final Fantasy 12 is ok, though I thought the story was on the weak side.
turn-based game, but not turn-based battles.
What does this mean?
I can understand the blitzball distaste though, it was polarising even then.
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.
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.
I feel both of these strongly for the same reasons, also GoW had all the sluggishness of a Souls-like which immediately made it not fun to play.
I absolutely love Factorio. I even bought the DLC the moment it came out.
I’m also absolutely rubbish at the game. I’ve never managed to finish the game on my own, and usually struggle to get blue science producing at all, much less at the correct ratio.
I do have fun with trains though, so I’ll often jump into friends’ games and just optimize (replace) their train networks.
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.
I’m curious how you play factorio because when I played there was very little refactoring, just adding more and more onto the assembly line.
That being said, that genre of game is absolutely not for everyone.
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.
Factorio sucks for perfectionists. You have to be able to embrace the spaghetti, and not everyone can
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.
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.
Mario Kart World.
Soundtrack is 11/10. But they dropped the ball hard on the entire open world aspect. Completely wasted the entire potential.
Instead we get lame ass intermission tracks that count as the first two laps of the next race, so you don’t even get to enjoy the new and remade tracks during championships, because you’ll blink and miss them.
