|
|
Post by Apollo Chungus on Apr 23, 2022 14:20:20 GMT -5
🧀Son of Suzy Creamcheese🧀 For the sake of fairness, I never meant to suggest the sudden introduction of one-time gameplay mechanics is an inherent bad idea that should be avoided at all costs; just that I have a particular dislike towards it (a dislike that might be more prominent right now because it stops me from beating games which I can then discuss on the game finish thread or elsewhere, which is entirely my own baggage). I'd never consider anything a 'game design sin' as there's so many concepts that can be received in so many ways by the individual at that specific point in time, it's deeply myopic to hold a specific design choice as objectively bad forever because what stinks to you might be exactly what another loves about that game. My apologies for not making that clearer.  Also, to address dsparil on something they brought up, my headphones don't feature a microphone so I'm not really sure why the system mic is so finicky in my situation. Regarding the Cing adventure games and their tendency to utilize DS gimmicks for either one-offs or recurring puzzles, I don't really mind those - in fact, I really liked the puzzles in Another Code for exactly this reason (that also had a "close the DS" puzzle). I suppose it goes back to what I was saying just now, that any design idea can be so heavily influenced by the player's own context that it can't be considered a hard and fast rule. I suppose my own bugbear is when a game introduces an element of external pressure in which you have a limit in terms of time or tries, something's actively trying to stop you, or something else that is making it hard for you to concentrate and just get things done. Cing's gimmick puzzles didn't have anything of this manner going on; they let you take as long as you need. So they didn't bother me if I was asked to blow into the mic - Captain Toad does have an active time element by only allowing the platform to lift for a short time, so there is pressure placed on you to do it within a certain time frame or you can't progress. As that scarecrow once said, it's "sensitive to context". Either you roll with it and carry on with the game, or you don't and have to play something else. And for the sake of fairness, here's two games I failed to beat that didn't trouble me with sudden mechanics, but a good ol' fashioned escalation in challenge that I couldn't stick. A Knight's Quest (Switch; First Time; Gave up at the Desert Proving Grounds)This is an action-RPG game I stumbled across a while back on the eShop, which I got pretty much because it mentioned a combination of platforming and action that felt like it came right out of the PS2 era, with POP-style wall-running and rail grinding to boot. I'm extremely into that sort of sixth-gen platforming and snatched it up something fierce. It's a decent enough game, though definitely quite a bit janky with its clumsy combat, odd sound mixing and lack of options regarding player convenience. There are warp spots, but I don't think you can use them until many hours into the game (which can be unfortunate considering individual areas are genuinely quite huge), and unless the game randomly decides to save, dying results in you being whisked back to the beginning of the area with all progress lost. This is what happened to me, as the Desert Proving Grounds kick off with a trio of tedious, cramped combat encounters where I found myself basically stuck against four enemies that kept pulling off attacks which restored their damage shields and dealt major damage. This is one of those times where I knew I couldn't get any further and found that such a let-down because I found the game charming in spite of its issues. It's got a surprisingly solid faux orchestral soundtrack by Will Bedford (the overworld theme is quite good to run around to), I enjoyed exploring the impressively large levels and the more platforming centric segments were a good time. If the game was more polished to have better combat and better ways of maintaining your progress, I imagine I could've gotten a bit more into it at least. Oh well. Kirby Battle Royale (3DS; First Time; Gave up at the events with Dedede at the end of the Platinum League)The last Kirby game on the 3DS I'm planning to check out, and it's a fairly good party fighter where you take part in a variety of mini-games. There's something of a Takeshi's Castle energy to the tasks, while throwing fuel blocks into a rocket so it reaches the highest altitude, grabbing coins off your rivals while escaping a mad ghost, and playing crazy games of volleyball. It's quite solid if you're in the mood for that, and I was in the mood enough that I reached the very final portion of the story mode. BUT. There's a problem. So, you play four events in a row with King Dedede and a rando guard against you and Bandit Waddle Dee. To come out on top, you have to win all four events. This contradicts what the game had previously done, in which it only cared that you got the most points by the end. What makes this maddening is that when you lose any of the events, you have to do all four from the beginning - even if you've only lost at the very end, it's back to the start! Considering the events you have to do are among the most chaotic where victory is easily a thing of chance, this is straight up nonsense to me. I'm know it's doable, but I just don't want to keep replaying these events until I magically beat all four in a row - and then have to do whatever comes afterwards because Kirby games always have an ending fake-out followed by a proper final boss and true ending - because I find it unreasonable. No thanks, Tom Hanks.
|
|
|
|
Post by 🧀Son of Suzy Creamcheese🧀 on Apr 25, 2022 10:35:22 GMT -5
🧀Son of Suzy Creamcheese🧀 For the sake of fairness, I never meant to suggest the sudden introduction of one-time gameplay mechanics is an inherent bad idea that should be avoided at all costs; just that I have a particular dislike towards it (a dislike that might be more prominent right now because it stops me from beating games which I can then discuss on the game finish thread or elsewhere, which is entirely my own baggage). I'd never consider anything a 'game design sin' as there's so many concepts that can be received in so many ways by the individual at that specific point in time, it's deeply myopic to hold a specific design choice as objectively bad forever because what stinks to you might be exactly what another loves about that game. My apologies for not making that clearer. Aight, fair enough. |
|
|
|
Post by spanky on Apr 25, 2022 14:20:19 GMT -5
Taking a recovery day after a bachelor party/vacation for a friend of mine. I read that Console Wars book on the plane and it got me in the mood to play an (extremely random) assortment of Sega games off my Mega Everdrive. Failed at all 3 games. This is partially due to the wireless controller I use dropping inputs frequently. I guess you can patch the receiver to fix this but I currently don't have a screwdriver small enough to open it up.
Rambo III
This does not seem well loved, but it is a pretty overhead fun run n gun It throws in a number of maze levels which bogs things down though. It does that thing where you can't continue on the last mission - On all other missions I had been letting myself get killed at the start of each level to replenish my life count. Whoops!
Darius 2
This is the only game in this series I've ever played. Very fast and fun with great music, but dropped inputs pretty much mean this game is borderline impossible.
Double Dragon 3: The Rosetta Stone
Unlike the NES version, this is a pretty straight port of the arcade game. It's not a bad port really, but the source material is just completely wretched. There's very little strategy to the combat - each encounter is just a slugfest and the only time you can really rack up damage on your enemies is during your post-knockdown invincibility window. I like the music though!
|
|
|
|
Post by Apollo Chungus on Apr 27, 2022 9:59:27 GMT -5
Kirby Mass Attack (DS; First Time; Gave up around the start of the second world)
It says something about how little I knew about this game that I had no idea until I started playing it that it was a touchscreen only game. That is kinda neat and gives you more control over specific Kirby boys (of which you can have up to ten, and you get them by eating more fruit), but I find the controls themselves a bit too clumsy for me. You can press the screen to command you Kirby boys to move, double tap it to make them run, or hold down to collect them all together and carry them around - it's quite easy to get these mixed up due to how cramped the screen feels with so many Kirby boys, and that's just for moving around!
I'm sure that this can be gotten used to after a while, but I couldn't hack it. If things get slightly too tricky or tough, I find myself getting overwhelmed and just flicking the stylus to throw Kirby boys at enemies over and over again till they go away. This is actually an excellent example of the point I was trying to make previously, that there's no such thing as a bad game design choice and it's all in how you see it. I imagine this can be a fun, frantic game with neat puzzles, cool visuals and lovely music by Shogo Sakai(!), but this isn't for me at all. Shame.
Sonic GT (Windows; First Time; Gave up at the Egg Tank boss fight)
This is a 3D Sonic fangame notable for actually being completed within only a couple of years, putting you through four fairly expansive levels with a mix of classic momentum gaining, along with moves and elements from the Adventure & Unleashed-era games. There's something kinda neat about how ridiculously fast you can get, as it's really easy to obtain but just as easy to lost control of and find yourself flying off a cliff. The levels are designed in a way that there's always routes and safe spots to prevent sudden deaths, but it can be sometimes unnerving how often you'll go up a hill and whole chunks of level whizz past you.
I got to the very end, but found myself stuck against the Egg Tank boss: which unfortunately is one of those "hey I have an annoying and longwinded strategy that'll take you ages to hit me even when you're actually good at the time, and unbearably awkward if you're the slightest bit clumsy" boss fights which I personally cannot stand. I hacked away at it for ten minutes or something, but gave up cause it was really getting on my nerves. It's a decent game otherwise, so at least there's that.
|
|
|
|
Post by Apollo Chungus on Apr 30, 2022 3:19:41 GMT -5
Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit (Xbox 360; First Time; Gave up around reaching Rank 3 or thereabouts)
I've mentioned a few times about wanting to get into old-school racing games, and one game I was always curious to check out was Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit (2010) by Criterion. I'd heard it was really good, and one of the few times somebody managed to make a successful attempt at shifting away from the Fast and Furious-style that the 2000s games were notorious for emulating. Finding a copy of it in the local CeX for six euros, I decided I might as well give it a shot. And then ended up returning two days later because god damn, I did not like this game.
A lot of this comes down to the truly hysterical rubber banding on display. I've never really liked rubber banding, in which racers behind you will never be too far away and suddenly gain a speed or power they shouldn't have to just overtake you. It's always felt to me like a source of fake tension in which the game breaks the very rules it establishes, making the majority of what you do not even matter. The game insists you go fast to get into first place, and then punishes you do that by having your rivals obtain supersonic speeds. But good lord, Hot Pursuit's rubber banding is atrocious - even from the very first race, I was barely able to overcome them by using the shortcuts (some of which don't even work in that sense), and it only got harder and worse from there.
Too many times, I've felt like a magnet: eternally repulsed by the other racers if I was at the back, unable to catch up for entire races, and then attracting every other person when I did manage to get into the front. What especially stinks is that this effectively kills my ability to learn the game's mechanics. I can't understand how to use drifting properly, or manage my nitrous boosts, or any other technique when they all just be kiboshed by the AI for no observable reason. It's awful, which makes it even worse when I found out that Need for Speed has been doing this for years and years. Well, that's put the entire series (or at least the 2000s-onwards games) out of my line of interest.
|
|
|
|
Post by excelsior on May 20, 2022 23:10:32 GMT -5
Wave Race: Blue Storm(Gamecube, First Time, Gave up because I have no patience in my current state of ailment)
I've been wanting to give a Wave Race game a try for a while since it's a rare case of me never having tried out a Nintendo series. I have Blue Storm on my shelf as I have for a over a decade but I guess this wasn't the place to start. Now I'm currently under the weather and feeling drained of any ability to cope with real frustration - really when finding something to do it should have been the most simplistic game I could find. Despite that I can say that the game is extremely difficult but more importantly extremely unforgiving. The basic steering takes a lot of getting used to and tracks are designed around following the circuit on the correct side of a selection of buoy's, where missing so many will eliminate you. Beyond that the tracks themselves are sometimes poorly marked and visually confusing. It's easy to misread what's going on or have no idea where to go. Now, if this were a trial and error situation where learning the tracks was encouraged that would be one thing, but the game is the most punishing I have ever come across. One mistake by slightly overturning and there's a good chance of losing the race, and with no retries that can also mean the entire competition. It doesn't help that the voice over speaks to you as though your an invalid every time you miss a buoy. I get the impression that devs at NST somewhere along the way forgot they were meant to be making an entertainment product and perhaps decided upon creating an implement of mental torture. Now I will give the game another chance when I'm in a more durable state of body and mind but I was inches away from snapping the disc.
|
|
|
|
Post by windfisch on May 21, 2022 6:52:27 GMT -5
Wave Race: Blue Storm(Gamecube, First Time, Gave up because I have no patience in my current state of ailment)
I've been wanting to give a Wave Race game a try for a while since it's a rare case of me never having tried out a Nintendo series. I have Blue Storm on my shelf as I have for a over a decade but I guess this wasn't the place to start. Now I'm currently under the weather and feeling drained of any ability to cope with real frustration - really when finding something to do it should have been the most simplistic game I could find. Despite that I can say that the game is extremely difficult but more importantly extremely unforgiving. The basic steering takes a lot of getting used to and tracks are designed around following the circuit on the correct side of a selection of buoy's, where missing so many will eliminate you. Beyond that the tracks themselves are sometimes poorly marked and visually confusing. It's easy to misread what's going on or have no idea where to go. Now, if this were a trial and error situation where learning the tracks was encouraged that would be one thing, but the game is the most punishing I have ever come across. One mistake by slightly overturning and there's a good chance of losing the race, and with no retries that can also mean the entire competition. It doesn't help that the voice over speaks to you as though your an invalid every time you miss a buoy. I get the impression that devs at NST somewhere along the way forgot they were meant to be making an entertainment product and perhaps decided upon creating an implement of mental torture. Now I will give the game another chance when I'm in a more durable state of body and mind but I was inches away from snapping the disc. Oh boy, have I got a cheat code for you  :
Luckily you can turn off voices in the options menu. So maybe you can keep that disc intact after all?
Your criticism is valid, this is a highly technical game that requires a lot of practice and track memorization. Similarly to F-Zero GX I've never completed it and it pains me to know that I never might get to play all tracks the game has to offer. Also similarly to GX I still love the game more than it hates me.
In all fairness, while you need patience to get a feel for the controls, it can be quite rewarding once you get the hang of it. I recommend the time trial mode for practice, chasing your ghost to become gradually better.
edit: even more amusing:
|
|
|
|
Post by excelsior on May 22, 2022 1:56:26 GMT -5
windfisch - Thanks that's a helpful tip. Definitely seems like a lot of practice is going to be required. In the meantime I put some time into the GB one and that's much more the pick up and play experience I was looking for right now. Oddly enough I finished F-Zero GX, the story and all the tracks on all difficulties. I obviously had much better reflexes when I was younger.
|
|
|
|
Post by windfisch on May 23, 2022 2:31:35 GMT -5
Oddly enough I finished F-Zero GX, the story and all the tracks on all difficulties. I obviously had much better reflexes when I was younger. Impressive!
I swear, at times that rubber-band AI in story mode punished you for getting too far ahead, thus forcing one to actively hold back until the last minute. That's the kind of BS that gets my blood boiling! |
|
|
|
Post by Apollo Chungus on May 29, 2022 7:08:56 GMT -5
I kept meaning to post on here over the last month, but I kept forgetting to do so. In which case, it's time for a big post.
Catherine (Xbox 360; First Time; Gave up at Night 3)
When I started doing the Game Finish Challenge in 2021, I had this plan of trying to beat the games I actually owned for years but never really touched or previously given up on. Catherine was one of them, as I'd gotten a decent bit into it on prior attempts back in 2016/7 before I gave up. However, this attempt didn't go well at all. I think the block pushing tower puzzles are too intense for me, and I'm playing it on the Very Easy difficulty! This is one of those games where I understand and appreciate the contrast between the quiet daytime sequences and the panicky nighttime stages, but I find that panicky becomes something I feel for real in the worst way. I don't think this game's for me, despite it being fairly interesting.
Fist of the North Star: Ken's Rage (Xbox 360; First Time; Gave up at Ken's Story Chapter 6 in Legend Mode)
Another game I owned for years but never beat, this is just Dynasty Warriors but based on Fist of the North Star. I quite dig the DW games so I always wanted to give this another chance, but that didn't work out. The main campaign is too slow and repetitive for me, and I particularly dislike how it lacks the suspend save seen in most DW games (and even the more typically-DW Dream Mode!) - something I'd like considering stages regularly last 30-odd minutes.
I gave up after a glitch at the very end of Chapter 6 prevented me from completing the stage and moving on, meaning I'd have to replay the entire thing. Not only that, but to complete the campaign means finishing Kenshiro's story along with six other character stories. Those latter ones only have 4-7 chapters compared to Ken's 16, but that's still way too much of this interminable pacing. Bollocks to it.
Sideswiped (Nintendo DS; First Time; Gave up around the Seaside Course)
I'd never heard of this game until I stumbled across a very old Tumblr blog by Ryan "BlazeHedgehog" Bloom in which he described it as Burnout 3 if made by the Ridge Racer team. It doesn't quite live up to what that might suggest, but I thought it was quite the enjoyably reckless driving game where you tackle various missions that largely revolve around crashing into other drivers. The physics add to that chaos a great deal, and the smooth framerate lets you appreciate that without killing its playability.
The only reason I gave up on it is because of something I've never seen happen before: one of the race tracks failed to load properly. It would show off the initial area it had loaded up, but there's no collision - you can drive through walls and go straight through the hills. The other racers' AI got botched up in that they'd drive around just fine at first, but then get stuck because the rest of the level hasn't streamed in. If you get knocked over and respawn, you're stuck in this weird animation that you can't break out of. It's truly bizarre, and the sad thing is that it isn't a one-off. I tried different methods of accessing this stage (quitting and then trying again, turning the DS off), but it's just borked. I'm gonna presume it's the result of a bad dump, which is deeply unfortunate when this came from the reliable DS rom collections online.
Sonic Classic 2 (Windows; First Time; Gave up at the Talus Tempest Boss)
Back in the early 10s, a lad named Hez put out a Sonic fangame styled after the originals called Sonic Classic. I never played it properly, but it seemed to be a well designed, feature-packed game for folks who wanted something like the Mega Drive games. For years, Hez quietly worked away on a sequel, and it finally came out last year as part of the Sonic Amateur Games Expo 2021 fangame showcase! I bothered to give this one a go, and it's thankfully quite a good game. I enjoyed traversing the stages with that familiar Sonic gameplay that allows for many different playstyles (speeding through, exploration, fannying about, etc) and the level designs complemented them very well.
Sadly, my attempt got curtailed just before the final batch of stages by the boss in Talus Tempest. The boss periodically raises the water level, and the only way you can hit them is to jump up on a block and wait until the level is raised. However, you also have to contend with a spike ball that bounces around and gets sucked back by the boss - with a good chance that you'll get knocked off and have to wait until you get another shot at hitting the boss. It's one of those battles I've described before, in that they're irritatingly cumbersome to pull off even if you're really good and nothing goes wrong, and insufferably awkward if you're even vaguely clumsy.
I had the thought of going through the game as Fang the Sniper, since he can hit enemies from afar with his pistol. Unfortunately, he can't roll and is too open to attack and hazards for me to really bank on him. It's a shame, since this is otherwise one worth checking out if you like the old Sonic style. Blast.
Tokyo Beat Down (Nintendo DS; First Time; Gave up during Day 2)
This is a pretty okay beat-em-up by Tamsoft (the folks who did that Captain Tsubasa game on the Switch, Onechanbara, Battle Arena Toshinden and plenty of other games) where you play as a group of cops dealing with a terrorist plot using their fists and wits. There's a surprising amount of story, with some excellently localized dialogue and cool presentation that gives it a lot of personality. Unfortunately, I found the combat too sluggish, particularly in how easy it is to get knocked over and how it too long to get back up. Running into a tediously aggravating fight with a forklift - another annoying boss fight like the Talus Tempest boss mentioned above - was the final straw.
|
|
|
|
Post by Apollo Chungus on May 30, 2022 9:43:54 GMT -5
EDIT: Alright, now I've gotten round to writing about these two games.
Bust-A-Move DS (Nintendo DS; First Time; Gave up at Stage 2-A of Puzzle Mode)
Grabbed a bunch of DS games that I'd never heard of or was itching to check out (this is how I ended up playing Tokyo Beat Down for a bit), and I went with this cuz I'd never played a Bust-A-Move/Puzzle Bobble before. It's a pretty cool concept and I enjoyed Stages 1-A to E of the Puzzle Mode, but it is a tough game. Very easy to screw yourself up with a misplaced ball, which isn't helped by how tricky it is to aim precisely, and it's a hell of an uphill climb to saving yourself before you hit the limit. Stage 2-A exacerbated this to the point where I was constantly struggling to solve the puzzles with what I was being given. It's too stressful, and I knew that there was 19 more stages to go that I figured were going to be even tougher. Good game, but it's not for me if it's gonna be this difficult.
Metropolis Street Racer (Dreamcast; First Time; Gave up during Chapter 1)
This is a Dreamcast racing game made by Bizarre Creations that acts as a precursor to the Project Gotham Racing series they made for the Xbox, utilizing the Kudos system where you get points for stylish driving. I mainly knew about the game through its excellent genre-hopping soundtrack by Richard Jacques. I was itching to play a racing game, so I downloaded this and gave it a shot as part of my attempt to check out Dreamcast games. Unfortunately, that scuppered pretty quickly by the game's - frankly - godawful method of progression.
To unlock anything past the first three events, you have to earn Kudos. You have to complete the given task and drive stylishly, which seems simple enough. However, the system is incredibly strict - you'll lost loads of Kudos if you crash or bump into something, and the game only counts your latest attempt. So if you decide to retry an event because you crashed too often, there's a not-insignificant chance that you'll actually come out of the event with less Kudos than your previous attempt, even if you don't crash!
What's even worse is that if you quit the event mid-challenge (even just to restart it because the game doesn't give you a restart button for some deranged reason), you actually lose Kudos! I know you gain some back when you finish it properly, but I don't know how much and if whatever you get in the race proper adds to that. So you're left with no choice but to replay races over and over again until you somehow earn enough to unlock the next event, and only that next event unless you get stupidly good. There's 25 chapters in the career mode, and the last chapter with a Kudos gate demands you get over 50,000 of them! I can barely get 400, nevermind 50K!
There's a good game in here, but it's absolutely borked by how ridiculous this progression system is. I don't say or feel this often about game developers, but I hope whoever came up with this choice at Bizarre had someone belch loudly into their ear.
|
|
|
|
Post by spanky on May 30, 2022 12:55:21 GMT -5
Ken's Rage seems like a real no brainer concept but the execution is definitely lacking. Like you said, it's just so SLOW which kind of makes sense thematically I guess. The dudes in HnK kinda hulk around are rarely in a hurry, but in a Musou game with giant maps you definitely feel it.
|
|
|
|
Post by Apollo Chungus on Jun 1, 2022 17:29:48 GMT -5
Man, another chucked attempt. I feel like I've probably contributed most of the posts to this thread - I dunno if it's because I've had worse luck at beating games than other folks, or if I just remember to post about these more often lol.
Scaler (PlayStation 2; First Time; Gave up at Level 10)
Scaler is a 3D platformer by Behaviour Interactive (formerly Artificial Mind & Movement or A2M), a studio mainly known for producing loads of solid if unremarkable licensed games during the late fifth gen/early sixth gen. You play as a boy who gets transported to another world and turned into a lizard, and you go around tackling linear platforming challenges, beating up enemies with straightforward if clumsy combat, and getting transformations that let you solve some neat navigational puzzles. I got this game back in 2014 or thereabouts cuz I remember seeing a trailer for it on a very old Xbox magazine DVD, but I never touched it after playing the first stage.
It's not a particularly compelling platformer, but it does what it sets out to accomplish fairly decently. Controls are solid, there's some good level design, levels give you a bunch of different routes to try out in whatever order you like (similar to the original Ratchet & Clank), it all runs smoothly, there's even a decent bit of challenge with the rail grinding sections being quite notable in this regard.
The only area I'd say the game flounders at is the narrative, which is as uninspired as anything in the platformer field could get. Just bland character archetypes and dialogue that sounds so clichéd it becomes actively distracting (and I don't even care about that kind of thing). Compared to other platformers of the day with excellent narratives like Sly 2, amusing comic farces like Crash Twinsanity, and even decent attempts like Ratchet & Clank 3 or Jak 3, Scaler is very underwhelming. It would even be underwhelming by the standards of the mid-90s, coming off as very charmless despite some admittedly okay animation.
But uh yeah, I ended up giving this a miss after I got to the end of a very long route in the 10th level and came up against a boss I just could not beat. It circles you endlessly and shoots projectiles at you, only one of which you're able to fire back at the boss. Unfortunately, the boss will not stop moving and the camera keeps tracking them, so it's like the level is endlessly spinning around. It's stomach churning just to orient yourself, and practically impossible in my case to actually hit the bugger. Games sometimes have an amazing ability to get in the way of themselves, and this boss fight is a pretty good example of that. Yulch!
|
|
|
|
Post by spanky on Jun 14, 2022 7:23:03 GMT -5
Xeno Crisis (PS4, Never beaten)
This is one of those crowd funded indie retro style games that is something of spiritual sequel to an existing title or an amalgamation of two titles . In this case, the game is a combination of Alien Syndrome and Smash TV. It's notable for having a ton of ports including the Neo Geo and the Genesis! I picked this up because it was on sale and I feel like it's been featured on Game Sack at least half a dozen times.
And it's pretty awesome! You move from room to room, clear out enemies and move onto the next one until you hit a boss. There's a decent variety of enemies in the game - a good combo of cannon fodder waves and tricky foes that have to be approached more strategically. Enemies drop dog tags that you can pick up and use as currency to upgrade your soldier between levels.
This game is quite tough. Enemies swarm you and as you progress through the game you get multiple enemy types in one room and the screen quickly becomes overwhelmed with bodies and fire. I think my only real complaint about this is the habit of some enemies to spawn right under your feet as you're moving which will cost you a life. The game generates weapons and extra lives seemingly at random. Actually I'm not sure how the RNG works because it would seem to spawn tons of extra lives when I did NOT need them and gave me crappier weapons (like the homing gun) during high tense moments.
Each individual challenge is manageable on it's own and the bosses aren't too bad once you figure out their patterns - it's just the game is so LONG. The last couple of levels are absolute slogs. I lost all my lives in the exact same spot across 2 playthroughs - on EASY mode AND I was fully upgraded. I enjoyed this, but I figure I just need to give it a break for a bit, especially once I found out you get a bad ending if you use any continues. I used 5 and STILL couldn't beat the game.
|
|
|
|
Post by Apollo Chungus on Jun 14, 2022 9:19:32 GMT -5
Chrono Trigger (Nintendo DS; First Time; Gave up at my first visit to 2300AD)
Chrono Trigger is one of those classic 16-bit JRPGs I've been hearing praises for since I was reading issues of GamesMaster or Official Nintendo Magazine back in 2008, and I swear it was one of the first games my brother downloaded when we got a new computer in 2010. But aside from maybe ten-odd minutes of playing the introduction, I never bothered to give it a proper look.
For whatever reason, I got the itch to try the DS port, which adds in the FMVs from the PS1 port and adds a couple of extras. It's a fairly good game, with a brisk pace that ensures the next interesting part of the world is just around the corner. However, I realized while playing the first visit to 2300AD that I kinda hate the ATB meter guff. I can't stand the meters slowly filling up and that being interrupted by enemy attacks; it's the reason I never bothered playing much of the SNES Final Fantasies and eventually why I gave up on FF7, and I hate that I can't get rid of it completely.
You can have it so the game waits for you to make choices when you're using items or Tech attacks, and slow the battle speed way down so enemies aren't attacking as frequently, but those only mitigate the problem instead of eliminating it. And doing the latter makes the combat really slow, which made me realize that I'm absolutely not in the mood right now for playing a game where I have to wait to make turns. Something about that pressure when there's all manner of variables like timing, enemy placement and so on just really bugs me at the moment.
So I gave it up, and aborted an attempt at playing the DS port of the original Front Mission for similar reasons. Maybe I'll give them a proper chance in the future, but they're not for me right now.
|
|
: