God of War

Maybe it never occurred to you, that a challenge is considered fun. And yes playing those stretches does make you better. Its called clutch. Playing god of war does not give you that ability to perform under pressure at all. It feels like, I can button mash to victory aside from the few QTE's that require my attention span now and then.

Of course then again, its the american way to win win win!!
(people in this country seem to have a hard time dealing with losing at anything, check out this WoW dude) http://wowseriousbusiness.ytmnd.com/

OMGTEH GAME IS TOO HARD, IT MUST SUCK ASSPOOP!! IMUST NOT SUCKAGE THEREFORE TEH GAMESUCKAGE!!!111 seems to be the general consensus when i see reviews for challenging games. And to sound professionally uptight, they just blame it on bad game design. Wonder why IGN gave soul calibur a perfect 10, because the reviewer said he liked to button mash and win, fantasize about a CG girl.
http://dreamcast.ign.com/articles/160/160953p1.html

a couple articles thats related on the subject
http://www.firingsquad.com/games/counter_strike_goodbye/
http://www.gamespot.com/gamespot/features/all/gamespotting/020203/8.html

so basically im tired of people scapegoating quality challenging games on "poor game design" rather than their lack of skill. Yes I do know there are some bullshit games out there that are on the impossible level due to some shit AI.

 

wait when did i scapegoat anything?

its a crappy artificial challenge to force a player to sit through easy worthless stuff just to do something impossible. all it does is pad the game and make it last longer it has nothing to do with disliking challenge. when im playing i want the game to only last as long as it takes me to learn/improve enough to beat it, not waste time on easy crap just to get back to the hard stuff.

kinda like VF. VF doesnt force you to play 4 arcade 1 opponents just to fight a guy from arcade 8. thats pretty similar to what this 'poor game design' is. if I want a challenge i want to fight guys from arcade 8, no exceptions or time wasters. give me the challenge straight up. its assumed that by the time i make it to 8, ive already gotten good enough to handle all the crap from the previous arcades so i dont have to slog through any easy fights anymore just for the sake of doing them.

 

Well, I wouldn't call it "bad game design."

Games like Shinobi was designed for the players to beat the missions in one whole run through. Each stage would be the parts of the whole game. You can think of them as the portions in between save points. So really, they are the same thing, except one is longer and the other is shorter.

There is a big overlapping grey window between trial and error, and actual skill improvement. Games with save anywhere features encourages trial and error type of gameplay. You reload at the exact spot you mess up and keep on trying until you get it through, and then you save your progress. You didn't actually get better, you just kept on flipping the coin until it landed on heads. Games without such or similar feature forces you to get better at the game as a whole to get through the challenges. You eventually learn to flip the coin and land on heads consistently. So that is the difference, neither is better than the other, just depends what you want out of your game. Unfortunately, to design a game which encompasses both of these types of gameplay is close to impossible.

If you play a game to simply experience it, and not care about score or thing like that, then games like GoW will be more to your taste.

if you play a game and tries to beat it without saving or try to entertain people who are watching you play, then games like Shinobi or DMC3 will be more to your taste. It's just that simple.

For some people, jumping on the very first mushroom that comes out in Super Mario Bros was a challenge.... I didn't believe until I saw it with my own eyes...

 

HA, you mean that angry pedestrian that knocks you out if you bump into him? Seriously just stay the fuck out of his way and you'll see that he's just trying to get by without hearing your stupid shit about a kidnapped princess.

 

You have a point there. But games like DMC have over-powering AI with a huge array of moves that seem near impossible to avoid. Do you recall the Frosts in the original DMC, they were bar none the most annoyng characters in the game. You try to get around them but they have attacks that counter that and others. Plus you barely have any moves that can give you some sort of help with manouvering away from the attacks. And if you remember you could not do double jump unless you had Alastor and had purchased the move. All other weapons were slow and did not have double jump; which greatly helped in avoiding their attacks. The tip they gave you was to use Ifrit, but it was too slow and by the time you got one of them, the other one would have already finished you. And their attacks did boss-like damage. Now how is that supposed to be anything like a challenge? It is more like annoyance. I am a competitive person myself and I welcome any challenge and I don't whyne if I find it difficult, but DMC is just plain annoying. Thats the point people keep trying to make here.

 

vf doesnt force you to throw escape either,
but shit you're gonna get your ass beat by top tier players if you dont learn how. The challenge is there, its up to you to take it.

Considering you say slogging through and worthless amount of things, i do consider it pretty much badmouthing it and paraphrasing bad game design as a scapegoat.

[ QUOTE ]
its a crappy artificial challenge to force a player to sit through easy worthless stuff just to do something impossible.

[/ QUOTE ]
Isnt that just games in general. Sticking challenge in the middle might just be too much for people to handle. Where as fun is relative, so is challenge. Like srider said some people dont know how to pick up that first mushroom.


Akira_PH: play the game completely (roll jump whatever) its not annoying, you just need to think a little more instead of slamming the controller. Plus have you seen the Dante Must Die no damage S ranking videos. It is beyond easily possible if you're half capable of what that guy can do.

 

Umm... I'm sorry, but when I played it, I can even beat them by mashing if I'm using ifrit. I'm not saying they are easy to beat or anything... but when you think something is hard.. you have to really think whether or not it's also hard for other people...

In this case, you brought up the wrong example to the wrong person, because of the reason I gave earlier. Like what phoenix said, the challenge is there, it's just up to you to take it. I can't beat Dante Must Die mode without dying or without using Devil Trigger, but those videos prove that people CAN do it. I'm in no hurry to try to duplicate those efforts myself, but when you see that it is DOABLE, it really puts your gaming skills into perspective.

 

Hmm, it seems that then I have a problem here. When you put it that way then it seems that I need some more practice when playing DMC. Then would it be possible if I could ask you for some tips? I have seriously tried to play the original DMC in hard mode, but I just can't get past those frosts. I beat DMC2 in all its modes, but the original just seems way too hard for me. Am I missing something here? A tactic maybe or strategy? This is my problem:

I am in the level where I have to take the guiding light back to the bedroom before it absorbes all my health. I do just fine against the phantom, but when I get to the frosts in the hallway I just can't seem to defeat them. I just don't find enought room to manouver in the hallway where they are.

Pheonix: Would it be too much trouble to ask you if you could give me a link to that video that you mentioned? I really would like to see this as it would be quite interesting. I myself have gotten an A ranking in must die mode, but never an S.

 

[ QUOTE ]
Srider said:
If you play a game to simply experience it, and not care about score or thing like that, then games like GoW will be more to your taste.

if you play a game and tries to beat it without saving or try to entertain people who are watching you play, then games like Shinobi or DMC3 will be more to your taste. It's just that simple.


[/ QUOTE ]

Agreed. Well said, Srider.

[ QUOTE ]
Painty_J said:

Checkpoints are linked to an artificial way to extend a game's lifespan. If the game is only difficult because it requires a superhuman skill for a long stretch of time, it's not fun. Fun difficulty comes from small challenges that are genuinely hard and improve your playing in the process. Slogging through a section of the game that is mind-numbingly easy except for the one puzzle/enemy at the end, just to die at the very end and have to redo it all because of some jackass checkpoint system, is not fun.

[/ QUOTE ]

True that, too.

Additionally, I do not fully understand why the limitations of old platforms (i.e. not being able to save, hell, some of them didn't even have passwords for levels) are suddenly being hailed as 'old-school' or 'hardcore' in postive ways.

I have very stressful memories of finishing games such as Contra, GG Shinobi, Sonic or Castle of Illusions back in the days in one sitting. Was it fun? To me it was more a compulsory obession.

Maybe the problem I have is that I am too competitive for my own good. I refuse to believe that I can be beaten by an A.I. in the reflex and hand-eye co-ordination department (obviously, I am well aware that I am no match for AI in, e.g. a chess game).

As a result, when playing a game like DMC3, like Jerky mentioned, I don't eat, sleep etc. It owns my soul until I complete it in a way that is satisfying to me (i.e. no cheating, no guides, no easy difficulty). Whether that's fun or not, is a very personal decision, as was previously mentioned in this thread, what is fun for one is pure frustration for sb. else.

For me, beating DMC3 was not that much fun. And I do maintain, that it would have been much more enjoyable, had there been more checkpoints.

Nonetheless, I do admire the skill that goes into completeing DMD difficulty, or doing those INSANE Ikaruga chains.

And I do believe that it is possible to cater for both the 'hardcore-no continues-no checkpoints-no nothing-all skill-all technizzel-old school' gamers and the ones that don't want to master each game they play but simply want to experience it: Put checkpoints in the normal or hard setting and remove them from the hardest one. There, you go. Everybody's happy.

Now back to Ikaruga practice.

 

That reminds me...

I remember renting Shinobi but I had no memory card... I got to the last boss in one sitting (although my score was shit). I kept getting close to beating him, but I I always ended up just a bit short...

That was one of the best gaming experiences of my life.

Simply put, being challenged by a game that forces you to return back to the beginning when you die, it's making your death MEAN something. You become afraid of dying, you want to protect your character from dying, and you don't want to go ALL the way back to the beginning. In a lot of "save anywhere" games, or games with frequent checkpoints, you don't mind just jumping off a cliff whenever, or dying while fighting an enemy, because you know you'll just reload right around the corner. I think that's bad game design... personally.

Maybe an easy mode should have unlimited saves, or checkpoints... but... for me the whole point of a game is to be challenged...

Having seperate difficulty modes (like DMC3, which allows you to switch to easy or very easy if you can't play it on normal) is a good idea for gamers today, as there is a split between people who want the game handed to them and people who want to learn and get good at a game.

I never felt so good before I was able to do long, 8 or 9 kill combos in Shinobi, before I was able to beat those old school stages in Mario Sunshine (not all of them, that shit was hard!) and if anyone has played it, beating Alien VS Predator 1 for the PC. In the original version of the game, you couldn't save in the middle of the level... they patched it because people complained, so then you got limited saves (except on easy mode, where you could save to your heart's content). When I heard the sound of a face hugger, the ones that can kill you in one hit, I was of course, scared out of my mind. That's because I knew that dying would actually mean something in the context of the game....

Death should MEAN something. Players should AVOID death... right?

 

I thought the cutscenes in GOW were horrid, they use this FMV which actually looks worse than the ingame engine and runs jerkily, the game looks insanley good for a PS2 game, but the cutscenes are hideous? Why not do them in-game engine? THe only sequences that need CG or FMV are the ones with loads happenings (and ironically it is these that have no issues).

 

Re: That reminds me...

If anyone's up for a challenge, here's an idea: Ikari Warriors (w/o ABBA)

/versus/images/graemlins/deadpan.gif