Forum Overview :: Gamerasutra :: Well, might as well dismantle their article piece by piece

[quote name="dustbin of history"]<font size="+1">Defender:</font> [quote]If a Lander gets away with a humanoid, the two merge into a Mutant, an insanely aggressive enemy that not only comes zooming to your location but likes to approach from above your ship, where it's hard for your horizontal lasers to hit. If all ten humanoids are killed or abducted the planet blows up, and all the Landers turn into Mutants in every level until the next multiple of 5, when the player's humanoid supply is replenished. <b><i>If this happens, you might as well walk away from the machine unless you're already a Defender wizard, because you aren't going to survive</b></i>.[/quote] [bold is mine, italics not mine] WHAT A GREAT IDEA FOR A GAME. It's like that part in Top Gun where you miss the impossible refueling plane and it just takes off without you like "fuck him." At that point it should just say "game over" but no you get to fly around until you crash. Actually, giving you a chance against many waves of hard enemies does sound a bit more fair, but Defender sounds like it would become boring as shit long before you ever could get good enough at it to survive 5 levels of mutants, besides what "Defender wizard" is ever going to let that happen in the first place? <font size="+1">Kaboom!:</font> Obviously this is just a simple twitch reflex game type of thing. I never really played the original but the concept is simple. Can't say anything bad about this, yano. It existed at a time when vidya gaems were born, and it got people's attention and money. So... good for them. I'm still not going to emulate this game, I got plenty of NES SNES and GBA roms. [quote]GameFAQ's page on the game (yes, there is one). [/quote] lol gameFAGS are so fucking STUPID!!!!!!!!!!! <font size="+1">Cobra Triangle:</font> Horay, finally a game I actually played. I have indeed attempted to play the rom as recently as last month. Part of the reason why this game fails is that the difficulty makes it impossible to experience the bulk of game, because you are either too busy avoiding death or dying. That is a shame because aside from the gay butt ass bullshit whirlpools and instadeath pitfalls and landmasses this was an excellent example of how a video game could showcase a wide array of play styles all in a single package, and make them all fun and well designed. Except for the fucking instant kill shit. Those strafing toy planes were like a decade or more ahead of their time. When I first got strafed by one I probably spazzed out like a dweeb (a word we used to use to describe nerds and geeks like all of you), and then I couldn't stop thinking of that CONCEPT of an environmental hazard which would zoom overhead at high speed and target you for some destruction. Best of all: the homing missiles could destroy them. It didn't really matter since there was an infinite amount, their threat existed as long as you played the level. Still, the idea that they were real physical objects that reacted to your character, instead of being just like a spiffy looking graphical representation of a func_hurt entity helps a lot with the immersion. [quote]Check it out, it plays like R. C. Pro-Am, but it's not a racing game! It has boss fights! It has a Gradius-style powerup system! It has an amazing variety of action! And it's bone-crushingly hard! Why did this game tank in stores? Why was this, which takes everything Rare's hit R. C. Pro-Am had and improves it off the charts, doomed to fail? The only reason I can come up with is that it's an incredible challenge, a game for experts. [/quote] Some might call them experts, I might call them LOSERS. :( [quote]Yes, Cobra Triangle is a game that demands mastery. Nothing less will do. Despite that energy bar at the bottom of the screen a depressing number of things will cause instant death. [/quote] Or... rent a game genie. <font size="+1">Sinistar:</font> Never played it. Looks like that asteroids game but with contra type alien thingys. <font size="+1">Solomon's Key:</font> Gay piece of shit puzzle game. I remember playing this in our flooded basement while mewm whined about the carpets being ruined. All I cared about was that I was playing this boring ass block jumping crap where it was possible to end up in an impossible situation, but didn't quit because I had nothing else to do except I dunno play jacks. Bring me some Portal already. I wonder if they're gonna mention Blaster Master. I should go back and beat that with save states someday. <font size="+1">Adventures of Lolo:</font> Like a prettier, cuter, slightly more fun version of Solomon's Key. It kept me entertained for a few minutes longer. <font size="+1">The Tower of Druaga:</font> ??? <font size="+1">Monkey Ball, a.k.a. Super Monkey Ball:</font> Finally a 3D game. And... I never played it. Is it good? [quote]This is where the fact that, when you push the stick, you move the level, not the ball, comes into play. If you think about it, tilting the level means moving it around a pivot point. The ball’s location is that point! [/quote] Ok hm. <font size="+1">Wetrix:</font> Again, I think I heard of this game before but I never played it or even seen screenshots of it until now. I was probably too busy playing through Half Life 1 and Starcraft over and over. [quote]This one’s a bit challenging to get information on, since there hasn’t been a lot said about it since its release on the N64, the first game by then-hopeful startup Zed Two. [/quote] N64. :( <font size="+1">One Man and his Droid:</font> A proto-Lemmings? But without the excellent SNES era graphics. [quote]If the player digs a horizontal tunnel the whole length of the scrolling, wrap-around map, he’ll discover that the tunnel will be off vertically by one character cell when he gets back to the start, an artifact of the way the game stores the map in memory and handles wrap-around.[/quote] Bluh. Once again, I enjoyed Lemmings for awhile because I rented it. Eventually you reach a point where it's just a level where your lemmings are splattering all over the place right from the start and you can't prevent them from dying no matter what. It was fun when I was able to pack them into one area of cakeland or a big spooky forest and then detonate them like so many jihadi terrorfucks. [quote]For some reason European developers, like Rare and Zed Two, seem less afraid of making games difficult. [/quote] Less afraid, or as I might call it, "laziness" or "bad design." Are people really impressed by hard games? HURR DURR INSTANT DEATH PIT. <font size="+1">Phantoms of the Asteroid:</font> What the fuck? [quote]A gigantic exploration game released two years before Metroid, containing fruit-shaped monsters, diabolical traps, and a heaping helping of mystery. [/quote] I never did beat the original Metroid game. I beat Super Metroid, and that is probably more important. See, this is the difference between bad "difficult" games and good "challenging" games. In Metroid you wander aimlessly for an eternity popping armies of <b>stuff</b> with your shitty underpowered weapons. In Super Metroid, you actually get <b>SKILLS AND ABILITIES</b> which help you survive the onslaught of powerful enemies based on your cognitive abilities, general intellect, reflexes, coordination (of the hand and eye variety), a very well designed minimap, and the desire to actually continue playing the fucking game. In normal Metroid, you get some of those but not nearly as many and they don't matter as much. That's pretty much the whole point. One of my big disappointments with Bioshock was that they deliver an incredible amount of tools to help you take down the hardest parts of the game... and then ruin that by letting you respawn in a free reset teleporty chamber if you run out of health. TAKE MY MONEY, BIOSHOCK, I GOT TONS. "Difficult" sorta implies that it's unnecessary. "Challenge" implies that it's rewarding and satisfying. <font size="+1">Faster, Harder, More Challenging Q*bert:</font> Shut up. <font size="+1">Blast Corps:</font> I beat the hell out of this game, but then I didn't have much else to do back then. It was play Blast Corpse, or play Mario 64 and OoT for the billionth time. As you can already tell, I am not a fan of frustrating vidya gaems. If I get frustrated with a bad game, I stop playing, with a good game I might continue a few times. Especially if I have any free time (I sure do). I don't enjoy biting into the controller or punching holes in a plaster wall. That's just unfair. I remember playing a few games to the point where I was so pissed off I would be screaming at the TV, twisting the controlled like a wet rag until it crackled like a bag of chips, even bit into the controller. I never did punch holes in any walls but I remember a next door neighbor did when he was trying to beat the first Castlevania or fuckin Ghosts and Goblins on the NES. Seems so pointless now doesn't it? (SAY YES) Blast Corps sorta showed up at the dawn of an awakening of video games as being a full on screaming multimedia art form. So some of the important ideas are here. There's tons of variety for the player (the vehicles), there's good music, there's building demolition using a physics engine, there's nuclear explosions, there is also a ton of unlocks to reward repeated attempts on completed missions. But it's not like there's a pot of gold sitting on top of the TV waiting for me to get platinum medals on that one stupid ass moon race mission bullshit. Still, I feel that I got my money's worth out of Blast Coarp. [quote]Some players these days consider a game only completed once everything has been unlocked; these games stand in direct opposition to that by offering rewards less than one player in ten thousand will see. It's worth noting that, for all these games, the mega goal is a complete secret: there is nothing in the game's UI to hint it's there until the player either achieves it or has a reasonable chance to. That way, it is a nice surprise for players who become surpassingly good, or at the very least, know how to read FAQs. (That's how come I know of the above things, by the way.)[/quote] In this case, it's a spinny floaty silver/gun metal grey medal with a flying star background that says something about how you got all the platinum medals and horay for that shit. <font size="+1">The Legend of Zelda (particularly the second quest):</font> SIIIIIIIIIIIIIGH. I actually beat Zelda 1 for the first time ever, a year or so ago. I used a FAQ to immediately recognize the stupid "secret bushes" that you need to burn down like so much pee-Resident Evil dictator of the Amerikkkan police state we live in... ? So aside from having to set fire to or carefully push or even fucking bomb every motherfucking rock in the game, it's really not too hard. Still, this is a perfect example of a failure to design. Don't blame gamers for finding that bullshit "hard." It's just bullshit. Aside from that, this is actually a nice showcase of the future of the Zelda series. The bosses require a different set of tactics, a combo of straight up combat and a special <b>but intuitive and obvious</b> secret puzzle weakness trick THINBGY. That's how I prefer to defeat challenging enemies. Give me all the abilities and tools you can come up with, and let me try to find the solution before I die. Also, if you can make it fair enough so that I can figure it out without dying 80 million times first, that is even better. I didn't play the second quest, but I know what it is. They scramble the location of everything. This would give the game twice the length for someone who wanted to play all of it. I preferred Zelda 3 and Wind Waker as the very best Zelda games ever (altho Wind Waker was incredibly easy). Playing on a rom instead of the old carts also made a huge difference in my enjoyment. Standing in front of the gambling minigame with a fresh quicksave just turned the place into a fucking bank robbery candy store. Ring the bell, take the money. I got the magic power armor increasing health ring THING WHATEVER before the 2nd dungeon. [quote]The original Legend of Zelda is a game that has fallen out of favor in some circles, with many people claiming it's too primitive, too simplistic, or too abstract. Hogwash; what they really hate about it is that it's hard, dating from an age when video games were supposed to be tests of skill, and thus difficult. [/quote] Huh. Well I suppose this person means "test of skill" as being like an infinite skill meter (example: pinball, which he mentioned earlier), but those are still based on a little luck so fuck off with the fireworks. The first Zelda game also had a really good ending. Maybe the first good vidya gaem ending in game history? <font size="+1">Deadly Towers:</font> gonnatakeyoubacktothepasttoplaytheseshittygamesthatsuckass <font size="+1">Mr. Driller:</font> Once a... driller, always a... driller? Is that dirty? <font size="+1">Mischief Makers, a.k.a. Yuke Yuke!! Troublemakers:</font> Hey I beat this game a long long time ago. It's a very good game. I could not make much progress when I emulated it on the N64 though, for some reason. Just didn't have the patience to figure it out all over again after so many years. I did beat this game before tho. Is it really that hard? I remember it being very fun, and again it's about giving you an effective pallet of tools and letting you comprehend how to solve the game's puzzles based on your ingenuity. [quote]And while most people can make it through the main game, the amount of the ending the player got to see depended on how many Gold Gems the player had found. [/quote] So... they just got tired of listing ancient shitty unknown games, and decided to throw in an undisputed classic, BUT mention the secret unlock THING. Did I ever get all the gold gems in the game? I don't fucking remember. <font size="+1">Rogue:</font> They're already over the depressing amount of underground "legends" after one N64 underdog unsung mini-hit. PSH <font size="+1">The Bard's Tale II: Destiny Knight:</font> I LOVE BARDS, I LOVE TALES, I LOVE DESTINY. [quote]The secret spell ZZGO, a.k.a. “The Dreamspell” is not technically a cheat because it’s code is available in the game, but it’s not in the manual. It’s a multifunction spell that does incredible damage in combat and heals the party completely, and when used outside of combat allows the group to teleport to any dungeon. [/quote] Uh, alright then? Sounds like a developer debug tool. I'm sure the challenge part is around here somewhere. [quote]Each of the seven main dungeons ends with a special area called a Death Snare. These are special puzzle areas set to a clock... a real-time one. Most of them would be fairly challenging on their own, but having to solve them to a real-world time requirement pushes them into frustrating, especially since teleportation doesn't usually work there. If the time runs out (and no clock actually appears on-screen) all your party members die, which is itself is quite a penalty to overcome. [/quote] That's just great. It's wonderful, even. :( (like puke up a donkeys ass what a shitload of motherfucking bullfuck) <font size="+1">Lode Runner series:</font> <font size="+3">YAWN!!!!!!!!!!!</font>[/quote]