Forum Overview :: Gamerasutra :: Re: One of those is bad, the other isn't

[quote name="FABIO"][quote name="curst"]1. Who the FUCK wants to FUCK with an inventory screen in a goddamn action game? FUCK that.[/quote] Yeah! Mother<b>FUCK</b> it! [quote] The more I think about the fundamental concept of "FPS + RPG", the more I dislike the idea. This is one of the major reasons (the other being "skills systems" that ensure that even if your aim is right-between-the-eyes with every shot, you're still going to wind up grazing your enemy for 2HP damage because your pistol skill sucks, never mind that in almost all these game's you're supposed to be a fucking military-trained cyborg or some shit). Is there any better way to completely murder my immersion than to make me juggle inventory items around all day? Action RPGs work because the inventory management is kept to a minimum - in fact, my least favorite action RPG ever, Throne Of Darkness, sucked almost entirely because you had to dick around with inventory shit constantly. No FPS/RPG hybrid has ever figured this simple rule out. Limited inventory bullshit sucked in SS2, it sucked in DX1 even though it was mercifully far less commonplace than SS2, it sucked in Silent Hill 4 (never mind that it's not an FPS/RPG, the key is that the older games didn't have it, SH4 has it, and it does nothing but add frustration), and I didn't miss it at all in DX2. Fuck limited inventory.[/quote] I think someone here wrote an article about this o_O SH4 was just carrying on the grand survival horror tradation of limited inventory+ammo/health = SCAREIRIER! For some reason this myth has persisted down the ages, despite being so obviously incorrect to anyone but OCD suffering gameFAG's writers. It was a tradition started with the first Resident Evil (or perhaps back with Atari's Haunted House, where you could only carry one of three key items at a time) where the inventory system was especially ridiculous for having each item you carry take up the same amount of space and making you discard them only at storage lockers. The first Silent Hill and Fatal Frame games are the best, scariest survival horror games ever, and they give you plentiful health/ammo and an unlimited inventory. COINCIDENCE? It's just a fucking lazy crutch for lazy designers when they can't think of anything like ATMOSPHERE to make their game scary. [quote] (Don't you have to hit a key to bring up the "these are your equipped items" HUD and then use the cursor to choose which item you want to equip and then hit an "equip item" key? I forget now but I remember thinking it was ridiculous.)[/quote] Independence War 2 was like this. They seemed obsessed with making it so every single menu and command could be reached by pressing the arrow keys enough times. Why simply press 'E' to bring up the engineering screen when you could hit down, left, up like you were launching a haidoken fireball? The whole thing just reeked of consolization from the "simplified" interface to the dumbing down of the repair and weapons systems. Yet to my knowledge, <i>there was no console version</i>. Bizzare.[/quote]