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Post by TΛPETRVE on Nov 5, 2015 0:44:33 GMT -5
I loved Boston Bomb Club as a kid, despite it being an equally shallow and frustrating puzzle game. It was more focused on annoying reaction tests than a genuine puzzling challenge.
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Post by Magma MK-II on Nov 5, 2015 12:38:30 GMT -5
Thankfully this had noting to do with the classic Amiga platformer.
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Post by mobiusclimber on Nov 8, 2015 3:01:14 GMT -5
You described the whole sub-genre (Hidden Object Adventure). Trust me, my sister is a fan of them but a Mystery P.I. game she is currently playing rehashes areas and puzzles over and over and she gets burned out by it. There's probably lousy DS ports out there, due to the low resolution and all that. I guess from never having played the genre, I just expected more out of the game. And yes, it does the same thing that Mystery PI game does, and reuse locations and objects in later puzzles. In fact, I think there's two or three chapters worth of content reused for eight+ chapters. I finally had to give up on the game b/c the items kept looking less and less identifiable the further along I got. The whole thing about the salami, for instance, i don't think I explained too well. (It was just the last thing that I remembered.) Rather than make the objects look cartoonishly obvious, they go the other way with it and try to make everything as bland looking as possible so it doesn't stand out at all. Then they put half of it behind another object so you're only seeing half the object you're looking for. What you end up with is a bunch of weird blobs that don't look like much of anything. And sometimes they grey the item out, further obscuring what it's supposed to be. I mean, I'm only vaguely aware of what a wiffle ball is supposed to look like. Don't show me half of one colored the same color as the background and expect me to find it. The thing that really bothers me is that I'd probably enjoy the game way more if they weren't trying to artificially make it tougher and longer than what their budgets would allow. They could get away with cutting out a few chapters and not really lose anything, and they could make the puzzles "fair" and not worry about ramping up difficulty (it's a hidden object game!), and the game would actually be pretty decent. There'd still be some problems, but it wouldn't feel like such a slog. But I also think they could tie the puzzles to the actual plot a bit better. (Coupled with the reusing of backgrounds/locations, the game almost feels like the puzzles are being randomly generated. I'm almost positive that isn't the case, but it sure feels like it.)
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Post by Gendo Ikari on Nov 8, 2015 7:00:56 GMT -5
A problem of Hidden Object game is that they are cheap, repetitive and often feel similar between each other. A rare one I found genuinely good is The Tiny Bang story, because it successfully attempts to be different from the usual formula: no text or silly dialogues, surreal places, screens that are great on a purely artistical level (usually in HOGs you see screens that are as detailed as they are bland), and most objects are evident but at the same time blend well enough to keep some challenge. The literal puzzle sections between chapter can be annoying, some minigames sprinkled here and there could be better, and after a while you may prefer a traditional timed hint system than having to catch dozen of flies around the screen, but they don't detract much from what may be the best title in the genre.
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Post by 🧀Son of Suzy Creamcheese🧀 on Nov 10, 2015 9:57:22 GMT -5
mobiusclimber You're still mostly describing the genre I had a lot of fun with one, I don't remember what it was called, but it (pretty much?) no story, just hidden object screens. I don't think it's a genre that needs a story forced in, but I think that about pretty much any genre to be honest.
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Post by Gendo Ikari on Nov 10, 2015 12:05:26 GMT -5
Most of the ones I played years ago had stories and were even intended to be episodic. The stupidest one I remember, which also had quite bad graphics, starred an old lady who was a great matchmaker (she had managed to lead all her five children to happy marriages) and was asked to lend a hand to a lot of single people. Another had a young female archeologist looking for clues left by a recently deceased uncle, of whom she even met the ghost at one point, involving an ancient secret society whose leader was apparently a nice old lady she had stumbled on early in the game...
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Post by Weasel on Nov 10, 2015 12:25:27 GMT -5
The only hidden object game I've put any serious amount of time into is Little Shop: City Lights (or Little Shop: Big City, apparently, not sure why the name changed). No story to speak of; you're the owner of a little curio shop that has just moved into a big city, so you get to browse around other shops in the city for strange things to put in your shop.
While the presentation of LS:CL was admirable, it does a few things (perhaps out of necessity) that I really don't like. Firstly, there is a time limit. A quite severe one, at that, as I frequently found myself running out of time before finding all the objects I needed. Secondly, the game will penalize you for clicking too much by locking out your cursor for a few seconds. Hints must be found within the pictures. And finally, this is one of those games where they only tell you the name of the object to find, and never any kind of description (it gave me "monkey" once, and it turned out they wanted me to find a wind-up circus monkey with the cymbals). The hints, on the other hand, replace the names with pictures of those items, though this doesn't always help, given that the objects are often camouflaged into the background and/or mostly transparent.
I can imagine this genre being great for casual gaming, but IMO, it reeks of adventure game style pixel hunting without any benefit of there being clever puzzles to solve with the stuff you're finding.
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Post by kingmike on Nov 22, 2015 1:33:00 GMT -5
It's an old article, but I got Musya. One of the criticisms I noticed about the game was the jumping. Is it just me or was the standard jumping height increased between the Japanese and English versions?
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Post by Neo Rasa on Nov 22, 2015 11:41:37 GMT -5
It's true, in the US version Imoto's normal jump is a little bit higher. It's unfortunately a half-baked change though like everything else about the game's development. Even with the increased normal jumping height, one still has to hold up when jumping to do the high jump to actually reach most of the game's platforms anyway. The jumping and falling speed is almost twice as fast though, which ends up making the US version a bit more difficult to get the hang of.
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Post by 16bitter on Dec 9, 2015 21:40:05 GMT -5
Anyone ever heard of White Van Racer for the PS2? That seems like a perfect addition to this article series.
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Post by Bobinator on Dec 9, 2015 21:55:50 GMT -5
Anyone ever heard of White Van Racer for the PS2? That seems like a perfect addition to this article series. Doing anything from Phoenix Games, or whoever did that one, seems like low hanging fruit, but that's just me.
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Post by Neo Rasa on Dec 10, 2015 0:11:58 GMT -5
If I didn't have to pay bills I would do a feature covering every single Phoenix Game in detail.
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Post by GamerL on Dec 10, 2015 0:16:20 GMT -5
If I didn't have to pay bills I would do a feature covering every single Phoenix Game in detail. That sounds like it would be incredible.
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Post by Neo Rasa on Dec 10, 2015 0:21:06 GMT -5
If I didn't have to pay bills I would do a feature covering every single Phoenix Game in detail. That sounds like it would be incredible. My Paypal ID is still neorasa@aol.com.
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Post by 320x240 on Dec 12, 2015 10:40:29 GMT -5
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