Bonus content and unlocks
 

The latest Penny Arcade post reminded me of some of the stuff that I really hated in some earlier games, Need for Speed: Underground (first one) especially. Some bonus content kind of pisses me off to a certain degree.

NFS:U is my favorite example. Why should I wait until I finish certain races or do a certain thing to unlock new decals and visual effects on my car? Or for that matter, what about performance parts?

There may be in-game reasons why you shouldn't need to unlock things - I kind of like the Bonus Songs and Bracket system for Guitar Hero, honestly - but have you ever found a game where you just kind of said, "Wait, why can't I do this now?"

Discuss.

I'm pretty sure almost every RPG ever has a "Wait, why can't I do this now?" factor.

I hate every game where you have to unlock a bunch of shit in single-player before you can use it in versus play.

It's like you go buy some fuckin' game so you can play that game with your friends and then you have to play through like twenty hours of single-player shit before you can actually do any of the multiplayer you bought the game for.

Agreed. God damn Rayman.

Well, for NFS:U the idea was to have people work their way up so that they aren't overwhelmed by going from dud car to a 9 second car in a matter of seconds. It makes sense that it works that way in the first NFS:U, but there should have been an option in the later games that scans for a completed NFS:U 1 save so you could go straight to the wicked cars.

With racing games, this makes no sense. In real life you would be able to get those things, especially the performance parts, they just cost more money. You shouldn't have to unlock them by completeing a certain tournament or whatever. They should just cost so much money that buying them from the off is impossible or not worth it, as you could instead buy lower quality upgrades so you can win races faster, and thus earn the big bucks sooner.

Personally I just hate all the useless bonus', rather than the illogical ones. I mean who the fuck wants badly drawn concept drawings?!

What is the practical difference between having to complete X tournament (for Y prize money) to unlock something, versus making it impossible to buy the parts without doing X tournaments?

They're just not going with quantity over quality route. I do agree with what Fifth said in some games, but I don't think it applies to NFS so much.

Errmm, how about realism?!

We still have that in games, right?

And I've always been under the impression that illegal street racers win MONEY, rather than engine parts!

I guess that's true, but then I haven't seen many cracked out bitch mini-games in racing games either, and I'm sure illegal street racers get some of those.

But then my only education is Fast and the Furious.

Sonic Advance 2 Wins over everything - Collect 5 Special Coins Each Stage to go to a Bonus Round. Once there, you have only ONE MINUTE to collect TWELVE chaos emerald pieces to form a chaos emerald. Then you have to do that for all 6 Worlds in the game, without messing up and without turning off the game. And This is the only way you can unlock the extra world to unlock the extra character (Amy Rose). I have yet to ever come close to it, eventhough I love that game to death.