Shitty bits in good games Options

[MARS]

In this thread, we shall rant about the annoying flaws of otherwise decent games.
Little nitpicks or outright killjoys that make you hate the game you usually love: Anything goes.

My first rant: Assassin's Creed.
I bought the PC version last week and I do have to say that it's by no means a bad game. Nothing groundbreaking but it does have a cool premise and it's certainly more unique than yet another ten-a-penny gore-shooter about armoured space marines and overly demonised aliens which are 'characterised' in such a way that they deserve to be murdered from the moment they're born.

I do, however, have more than a few problems with AC. Nothing huge but as everyone knows, many a little makes a mickle:

- The annoying beggar women. While it's certainly a good way to portray poverty and despair, they can get very, VERY annoying because they won't fucking STOP. You can hardly cross a busy marketplace without being assailed by at least three of these pests. "I'm hungry, I'm poor, I'm ill, bla de bla de bla". Cut me a break, I'm an assassin, that's why I'm carrying all these knives and swords. Moments ago, I wiped out an entire platoon of crusaders so YOU better don't get on my tits! As if that wasn't enough, they're actually CHASING you. Can't just walk away and ignore them like, you know, real beggars: They actually have the audacity to RUN after and BLOCK your friggin' way. At this point, I usually put them out of their misery by throwing them into one of those poorly constructed marketstands. You want food? There you go!

- Those fucking lunatics who keep pushing you for no reason. They roam the streets with no shirts on, mumbling incomprehensible gibberish to themselves...and once you get close, they push you, knock you off your balance so you stumble right into an angry patrol. Whenever my sync-metre allows it, I give them the same treatment as the beggars...or I break out my hidden blade...or give them a demonstration of my knife throwing skills. What's even worse than the lunatics? The drunkards who infest the port of Acre. Their behaviour is largely the same, with the only difference being that they push you off the fucking pier and Altair, despite being a super-agile parkour assassin, sinks like a rock because the poor fellow doesn't know how to swim.

- Guard overkill. Oh dear. I have to meet an informant who's waiting for me in a small yard surrounded by massive stonewalls, there's only one entry guarded by two guys and as if that wasn't silly enough, there's a patrol of seven OTHER guys waiting inside. For some reason, they KNOW who I am and unlike the 13464257 regular guards that didn't even notice me moments ago, these blokes attack me INSTANTLY, forcing me to run away before meeting my contact, make a desperate escape through crowded streets with more and more guards running after me. Eventually, I find a hideout a few metres ahead...keep running...all right, no-one sees me right now...almost there...FUUUCK! I was literally two steps away from that haystack when another guy re-establishes visual contanct...And the running goes on and on and on...

- The general uselessness of collecting flags, doing side-missions etc. And the fact that the mandatory missions are so terribly repetitive. "Altair, I've got a clue for you, but first, you have to collect a bunch of flags I've hidden all over this fucking place to tease you. And just for shits and giggles, I'm giving you an arbitrary time limit. Guess the great Templar conspiracy has to wait, bro!"

Anyway, that's all I can think of for now. Your turn.

[Pav3d]

Escort missions in any game.
Especially in RE4, I just want to shoot zombies ffs.

Any "follow-the-car/person-but-for-gods-sake-dont-go-to-near-them" missions in any GTA's. Stop not letting me slaughter everything, this is mind numbingly boring.

[Stalker]

As for Assassins Creed. Huge amounts of guards weren't really a problem. You could be in a fight with hundreds of them and you would still onehitkill one after another with a counter-attack. Although I can't remember which difficulty I played (I think medium, but I'm not sure).

As for the beggars. What really made me mad was the fact that you lost HP if you killed them (or other civil guys). It would have been real fun if you could go crazy and just murder everyone GTA style


Another game that comes in my mind is Far Cry 2.

The idea itself wasn't bad but a few things completely ruin the game.

1.) You always have to drive 500 miles cause if a guy in the south-west of the map sends you on a mission, you always have to go to the north-east. Yes you can take a bus, but in the end you still have to drive for an eternity because the bus-station is just so far from you and your target away that it isn't a real shortcut. And if that wasn't enough...

2.) every damn 2 seconds a car full of evil guys attacks you and damage your car. So you have to kill them repair your car and drive on
... BUT...

3.) every 10 seconds you come to an outposts full of evil guys (no matter if you have already cleared it previously) who attack you and damage your car.

4.) And no matter for which faction your doing missions, everyone shoots at you.

These points make me absolutely hate a good game.

[NergiZed]

As for Assassins Creed. Huge amounts of guards weren't really a problem. You could be in a fight with hundreds of them and you would still onehitkill one after another with a counter-attack. Although I can't remember which difficulty I played (I think medium, but I'm not sure).

As for the beggars. What really made me mad was the fact that you lost HP if you killed them (or other civil guys). It would have been real fun if you could go crazy and just murder everyone GTA style


Another game that comes in my mind is Far Cry 2.

The idea itself wasn't bad but a few things completely ruin the game.

1.) You always have to drive 500 miles cause if a guy in the south-west of the map sends you on a mission, you always have to go to the north-east. Yes you can take a bus, but in the end you still have to drive for an eternity because the bus-station is just so far from you and your target away that it isn't a real shortcut. And if that wasn't enough...

2.) every damn 2 seconds a car full of evil guys attacks you and damage your car. So you have to kill them repair your car and drive on
... BUT...

3.) every 10 seconds you come to an outposts full of evil guys (no matter if you have already cleared it previously) who attack you and damage your car.

4.) And no matter for which faction your doing missions, everyone shoots at you.

These points make me absolutely hate a good game.

True, but all that is compensated with the fact that Everything is on FIRE.

The one thing I couln't take in Farcry2 was the lack of mission vareity. I stopped instantly after I arrived at World 2-1.

[MARS]

I agree on all points regarding FC2. The mission design was dreadful, especially those stupid, unrewarding buddy missions. They weren't actually helping you, on the contrary, whenever shit hits the fan, they get into trouble and YOU have to get THEM out. In a way, FC2 had similar problems with its missions as AC: Repetition ad nauseum. For every cool scene, there'll be ten which are an utter waste of time.

Next rant: Pokémon games

- Hidden machines. At this point (PKMN Diamond and Pearl) you need one to cut down shrubs, one to smash small rocks, one to move bigger rocks, one to cross bodies of water, one to climb up waterfalls, one to climp up cliffs and one to remove sight-hindering fog. That's SEVEN. Seven moves, all of which - except maybe Surf and Waterfall - are a total waste of a precious moveslot. Give them to one of your main Pokémon and they'll be less effective in battle because you waste a lot of moveset potential. Add a HM slave to your team and you waste an entire slot which could have been used for another DECENT monster. HMs MUST die. Replace them with actual quest item: Instead of using HM Cut, you get hedge clippers. Instead of HM Rock Smash, you get a hammer. Instead of HM Defog, you get deus-ex-machina goggles and so on. The only HMs that should remain as actual moves should be Surf, Waterfall and Fly.

- PKMN Diamond and Pearl special: Going through minutes of lengthy dialogue and a battle before you can check the stats (=>nature) of your starter. I think this was one of the reasons why I still couldn't be arsed to finish my Diamond version. In the old games, you used to be able to save your game RIGHT BEFORE you picked your first Pokémon. You could easily check out its stats and reset the game if you didn't like them. This time, you save the game but what follows is a boring cutscene, a Pokémon attack, the part where you select YOUR Pokémon, a 'fight' during which you cannot enter the stats screen, another cutscene and THEN you can see whether you picked an adamant Chimchar or not.

- Zubat-infested caves/Tentacool-infested oceans

- Way too many trainers with way too many weak/boring/repetitive/generic monsters in some places

- That ONE fisherman-bastard with a team that consists of...*drum roll*...SIX MAGIKARPS who seems to appear
at least once in EVERY game because some arsehole in the development team still thinks that this is really funny

[Pickysaurus]

- That ONE fisherman-bastard with a team that consists of...*drum roll*...SIX MAGIKARPS who seems to appear
at least once in EVERY game because some arsehole in the development team still thinks that this is really funny

^ This

My rant on Pokémon games;

- Too many pokémon!
Ok, so first off you had 151. Which was fine. Then you get another hundred or so added. These are also fine. But after that they strap on an additional hundred or so each game, and they are getting less and less imaginative. I mean, whats the point in some of them. Like Porygon2... Wow it's the exact same pokémon but a different shape.
Also, they move the goal posts in the newer ones. You need 250 pokemon, but wait. When you get to a certain point you have another 100 to get.

-Inter-game trading!
I think it should be possible to get all pokémon (at least those of that era) on the same game. Just make some more common on different variations. I mean, what if you live in a small village where everyone has the same game. You can't get any of the other ones. I have fire red and I have caught every single pokémon possible on the game. But to complete my pokédex i need about another 100 to be traded from other games. A waste of time if you ask me.

[NergiZed]

Hehe, I cheat in all my Pokemon games because I can't be arsed to waste that much time training all my dudes. I also have a cheat that grants me the ability to steal a trainer's Pokemon which is oh-so-Satisfying.

I simply don't play normal pkmn games anymore, as it's just so slow and is the same stuff over and over again.

[MARS]

I agree on both points:
Firstly, I really HATE most of the new Pokémon, those of the fourth generation in particular. It seems as if the only decent monsters they added are actually evolutions for older mons like Magmar, Electabuzz or Rhydon and the starters. What's the point of things like this or this? And those horrible legendaries. Remember back in RBY when there were three legendary birds of lightning, fire and ice and an evil genetic mutant? In GSC, they gave us three legendary dogs and the guardians of sky and sea. In RSE, they gave us three golems, the creators of land and sea and another guardian of the sky. And now, in DPP, they gave us three identical looking psycho...things, the creators of time and space, some inter-dimensional monstrosity...and Arceus, who's basically the creator of everything, god, the allmighty, the alpha-omega, 42, the metaphysical being that started it all, so powerful that it can actually be captured in a regular, mass-produced Pokéball, allowing the greatest force in the entire universe to be controlled by a 12-year old. Bottom line: They should have stopped adding new Pokémon about halfway through generation 3 + some of the new evolutions from generation 4 and that's already being generous.

[Shock]

I liked Hitman Blood Money a fucking lot, however:

1. I'll start with the final mission. Save for the little funeral massacre, the final real mission Amendment XIV, is the worst designed mission of the damned game. It's boring and aside from a few tricks, the normal way to play through this is very linear, with a cutscene. I don't like cutscenes in the middle of Hitman missions, they make me feel I'm less in control of the game, while being in control is the best part of it. The start of the mission is also poor, with only one route into the next area (or rather, the only area you are able to go to from the starting point), and there are SO MANY DAMN GUARDS there is no way to get through it without the obvious toiletsedative disguise. This is the only mission that cannot be completed on SA rating without wearing a disguise. This mission sucked. The best mission imo was the second one with the wine guys, it's a bit weird to have things roll out this way.

2. The papers. While they are a nice touch, they don't contain any different information for every mission, aside from the standard shit about who the target was. Always bickering about cartridges, shots fired, witnesses yes/no/how many, and the fact that no where on the world the police gives a shit about the death of security personell. They are also so stupid that whenever you get caught witnessed, they make this very same sketch of this totally unrelated face every time. This all gets old very fast. If they had included some specific lines about you for every mission it would be more interesting.

3. Witness behaviour. In this game, if you want to play it right and get a SA rating, guards are not your enemy, civilians are. On lots of occasions they appear to have superhuman powers, seeing through doors like they werent there, alerting every damned guard in the area messing up everything. Numerous times you complete a mission thinking you have SA, only to find out you had a witness, having absolutely no clue where he/she/it caught you doing something.

4. The inability to carry with you the M4 Assault rifle and the Shotgun, and other large weapons, in a weapon case with you. While in the game on various occasions you get to hold cases with weapons inside them, take for example the Dragunov in a weapon case in the introduction mission. Why I cannot use the same briefcase in the next mission is not clear to me. This pretty much liimts the use of these weapons for 'All out massacre' runs or occasional lucky targets near the ICA box (like Manuel Delgado with the Dragunov), but other wise they are not usable for any serious mission, which is too bad and could totally be fixed.

5. As beforementioned, cutscenes within missions. On one occasion you could actually get spotted during a cutscene (if you dont wear a disguise) which is really stupid. Please devs, if you really have to include cutscenes to remove me from the action then at least freeze the guards so I don't get spotted unable to do anything about it.

I can't think of much more at this time.

About pokemon, I agree it's become a little bit lame. Every generation also seems to add more and more legendary pokemon that are in one way related to the creation of the world and even the damn universe. It's all a bit too offworld for me.

Sometimes Pokemon babble reminds me of Star Trek. Temporal pokémon and yeah...

This post has been edited by Shock: 22 Jul 2009, 15:24