...oh, man. The first time I played that game I didn't realize what that gauge meant and used that super special awesome beam against on the first boss after I got it.

I was panicking as it seemed to refuse to die, despite so much damage racking up. And then I died.

Save tokens, well I never actually used anywhere near enough to worry.

Okay, I'm not sure where you got that but I never noticed any of that. In fact, that's how I farmed items and my characters to a point where I didn't need to use the form at all (and the game's ridiculously hard then) but I never noticed harder items. And you can use the form fairly liberally, wasting it is fairly silly. I mean, it's 1% to change, 1% for a basic attack, 1.25 per enemy for a sweeping attack and 1.5 for a double damage attack. There's the boost, which is 2% per charge (and with 5-6 boosts you start oneshotting bosses), the dash which gives you like .05% per use and the gradual .01% from walking around. And Dragon Breath, which was awful and never should be used.

What I hate about videogames? Movie tie-ins, all of which suck. Are people still stupid enough to go out and by these things? Haven't they realised by now that they're all shit?!


Games where you regenerate health by simply hiding and resting somewhere quiet for a few seconds. In action games this takes all of the danger out of the situation, because all you have to do is run away, which is the exact opposite of what you should be doing in an action game. Unfortunately, the otherwise excellent Uncharted is guilty of this. The only games that are exempt from this are SotC and Portal, because health isn't important enough in either of them in the first place.

There are probably other things I hate, but I can't really think of any right now.

I like save points, only because they actually remind me to save. Like I was playing Lunar, and I lost 3, 4 hours of playing because I forgot I could save anywhere.

Perhaps a secondary difficulty setting could be implemented to toggle savepoints and quick saving, to fit the particular player's tastes.

Hulk: Ultimate Destruction

Theory destroyed.

I think that with the save and battle questions, it's a matter of what the game type and layout demands.

I believe a save point system is perfect for a normal RPG, so long as there's enough opportunity to use them. You can have multiple files for different players, and backups for if you lose data. As long as there's a reasonable amount per area and one before and after every boss, there's no issue. I also think that turn-based battle in the form of ATB is still suitable for normal RPGs. True turn-based, not so much. FFX did it well enough, but true turn-based is really out right now. Having an ATB turn-based system still encourages tactics, especially systems like the one used for the Grandia games, notably Grandia 3, without being clunky.

Now, for other games, real-time battle is fine. Like for real-time strategy, or shooters. Maybe even party RPGs, like Star Ocean, as much as I disliked it there.

Save items are, in my opinion, an unnecessary time/money sink. I've seen games with save items and never liked it much, as you can run out at inopportune moments, or use them up too fast if you're a double-saver like Phantom. I also dislike quicksaves as a permanent solution. You can screw yourself over pretty badly with them on occasion, and it encourages using them as a crutch. Being able to save anywhere takes all the tension out of the game, which makes it boring, since part of the experience is a sense of accomplishment for beating a level or boss. I have nothing against temporary "memo" saves from certain FF games, but those are gone when you switch off, meaning you at least can rely on a save point save if you screw yourself over. Because a memo system forces you to, if you want to come back to it later. It's really a happy medium, because you still can save some data in-dungeon in case you die, but there's always a guaranteed hard copy at the last big accomplishment and the option of multiple files.

Autosaving is really starting to show itself recently, and it's not without merit. But really, most of it depends on having the autosaves where you'd otherwise have save points, and it can be catastrophic if it fails. With save points, you can have multiple files, so if one gets hit by a power outage, you at least have an older one to fall back on instead of starting over. With an autosave, not so much. FPS types really benefit from the system, but not so much RPGs.

Odjn, the percentages for the good items drops the higher the gauge is. If you ever use it past a certain point, you can't access some bonus places.

And Hulk: Ultimate Destruction was truly awesome. Any game that allows missiles to be exchanged for COWS and lets you play baseball with a rocket-propelled cow and a pole is awesome.

Also? RPGs with a stupid new game+. As in, they let you take something from your last playthrough, but it's something so worthless that there's no need for it. Radiata Stories is insanely guilty of this by only letting you keep your normal items ( not useful at all ), but not your gold. All your accessories come too, not that they're that useful. All your characters that you struggled to get? Gone. You still have their entry on your "friend book" which is just proof that you got them...Also, you don't keep weapons and armors which are also way useful. Oh, you DO keep your skills with weapons, though.

I suppose there's always an exception to every rule, but weren't there 2 games based on the last Hulk movie? And the first WAS shit. Ultimate destruction drew in ideas from the comics as well, so that might explain it.

Oh and I suppose spiderman 2 was pretty good. But other than that, movies to games = utter shite.

The Lord of the Rings games were pretty good. Ecks vs. Sever was actually much better than the movie that shared it's name. Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie was a pretty good game, from what I remember. Motherfucking Goldeneye.

Theory obliterated. Go out and play Shadow Hearts: Covenant, and then tell me that pure turn-based combat is out of style.

I hated the LotR strategy game, Battle for Middle-Earth. For no absolute reason at all I lost everything. No, no one died or anything, I just lost the game randomly. ALSO SOMETHING THAT I HATE: Game gives you no idea of what the heck you're supposed to do and then kills you out of nowhere. Metroid getting you locked is something entirely different.

Ving Rhames: Absolutely nothing to do with this discussion.
 

I agree with bluestarultor and personally I think that the traditional save point system versus an auto-save versus a quick-save argument is a moot point. It all depends on the game, and there is no mutual exclusion that says if you have one then you can't have another. A developer should do what helps the flow of their game the best.

Now, not to say that some games that had a traditional save system couldn't have benefited from a different system of saving. That is far from the case.

For example, RE4 and Silent Hill 4. Both games I think would have been ruined by a quick save function. Both had a traditional save system, and it fit the feel of the game very well. They are essentially survival games, but not overly hard ones. Worst case scenario something goes bad and you die, but realistically when something goes bad in those games you just end up using extra ammo or a health item you had in reserve. Its a good trade off for messing up, you have to use extra resources, and I think that makes for an enjoyable difficulty.

Other side of the spectrum. I can think of so many games where the ability to save anywhere have not only ruined the gameplay, but made it trivial. Knights of the Old Republic for example, there were no repercussions for anything you did. Didn't like the way that conversation turned out? Quick load. Didn't get that influence with Kreia? Quick load.

I will concede that a lack of skippable cutscenes is a crime, and that game developers still need to work on when to use what save feature. Also, many games (Most of them probably) where a quick save option is not available could greatly benefit from a suspend data option, where it makes a quick save and then goes back to the title screen, then deletes it when you start back up.

HATED Metroid. Why did they not tell you ANYTHING? But anyways, LotR: Battle for Middle-Earth is really fun for me. It's like Total Annihalation (Anyone who's ever played this game and tells me about it, gets a cookie), but with trolls and castles. I see no reason someone WOULDN'T like it.

Alright, I've commented on other people already. My most hated thing? Bad voice overs. It digs into me so much when people have too cheesy of a dialogue, or too long of one, just because they said something completely different in Japan. This is why I like the older games: NO MOVING MOUTHS.

I don't understand your "artifical limiting" argument. A video game IS artifical limiting. Every single thing in the game is an artificial limit. Otherwise I can argue things like "I'm going to destroy this Martian colony, why can't you give me a rocket launcher first level instead of a pistol?". Everything in the game is designed to provide challenge and to limit the ways you can pass the challenge. I fail to see how the save system is any different.
With checkpoint they allow the designers to string things together so you have to be able to make a series of moves without screwing up, rather than just a single move. Thus it increases the skills needed to pass a game in a way that cannot be done with quicksaves.
Checkpoint systems can do this as well, though they usually used poorly. As long as you have a checkpoint between each sort of challenge set then it's fine. They are usually terribly underplaced however.

The original Metroid was miles ahead of itself, had a great concept that became a fantastic game series for the last two decades or so...but in the beginning just giving you a huge world to explore when it all looks identical save level-to-level transition was just awful.

Grand Theft Auto couldn't pull off a no-map system and Metroid couldn't either.

Oh, you mean the ones where you only ever need to press the 1 attack button over and over and over and over and over again to kill everything? Come on, it's even more tedious than dynasty warriors.

I have never heard of this game or the movie it's based on, so neither could've been that great.

I don't think I can comment on this without it sounding flamey, so I won't.

I may have to conceed this point, but having never played it I can't really say.

Fact is most games based on films are shit; minority report, the first hulk game, transformers, die hard trilogy, jumper, fantastic four, every harry potter game ever (in fact, pretty much any game made for kids, but apparantly that's ok because their supposedly not old enough to be able to tell what's good and what isn't anyway/sarcasm), mission impossible, ironman (notice the particular trend of comic book movies yet?), superman returns (and another), batman (all of them), any star wars game that tries to follow the original plots rather than some sort of off-shoot like battlefront, and to go back some years; home alone, back to the future aannndd ... ET: The Extraterrestrial (you know, that game that nearly brought down the whole goddamn industry?).

I'm sure somebody will post up some more examples now of other games that were based on films that were quiet good, and I'm not denying there aren't some, but there's a whole lot more that were simply rushed out to coincide with the release of the movie and are crap because the licence is designed to shift the units, rather than the game being anywhere near half decent.

And I'm sure that if anybody does wish to post up a list of decent movie-game tie-ins that I could equally post up even more that were utter crap, but I think I've made my point by now.

*shoots devestator autocannon*
This weapon is horribly overpowered and ruins the entire game.
*keeps shooting autocannon*

Artificial limiting that makes the game less fun.

That's completely subjective though.
I don't find quicksaves/loads fun. I find them tedious to the extreme and render the game to a series of quickloads until the best option is found.
You could say "Well just avoid quicksaves then" which I do. But the fact remains that your statements are completely subjective.

See, here's the thing: In your complaints against quicksaves, you offer up the option of not using quicksaves, which is a way for you to work with the quicksaves and derive enjoyment. For me and DFM and every other person who wants to utilize the full power of the future we live in, there is no compromise with the backasswards save and checkpoints we're stuck with.

But should every game be targeted at every player?
In the games targeted at me the developer can spend more time developing the game more as they don't have to spend time programming saves or hardware space. By not having them, in theory the developer should have more time and more power to build a better product.

Well, duh.

You can't be serious. "Quick save" and "hardware space" are not eating weeks of development time.

BHS - Absence of something hurts the game. Simply ignoring a function of that game means the rest of us aren't totally shitfucked when it comes to stopping playing whenever we want is much simpler.

Subjectivity has nothing to do with it.

EDIT: Seriously, I'm not a programmer but it can not be that difficult to put in a "Save state" system into a game. Retro game emulators have them almost by default. I'm willing to bet it'd be more work to put a non-save state system into a game than one that relies on the ever-popular "Save Point" or "Checkpoint" system.

Absence of something doesn't hurt a game in the general sense. Every single game is missing an infinite number of things which don't hurt it. What you have to argue is whether absence of something specific hurts a game.
As for how hard is to program save files I wouldn't have a clue. But all I know is some games on my computer have massive save files (like my football manager games generates save files of about 1.2gig). Unless the console has a large harddrive I don't know how it would handle stuff like that.

Now you're just stretching my words and instead muddling with abstract concepts. I don't even want to debate the point anymore.

Games that are difficult in the "Trial and error" sense. God, it works some games like Kirby Super Star but in others it's just awful.

It's more that I don't understand your argument at all.
At one point you're arguing there is no save feature in games because developers are "lazy" and then that it would be piss easy to put save systems in game. These concepts are oppositional.
I mean you could be arguing that they are just trying to make the game harder by changing how you can save but I maintain that it is not an arbitrary mechanic but one that is tiered around the ability to string together moves in a row, rather than mastering the ability to achieve single isolated tasks. It's a different design mechanic and one that is actually harder than just giving players single tasks to achieve as you force them to interrelate abilities and skills. It also offers up much more design freedom.
And you're not helping when you make broad sweeping statements like "Absence of things hurts games". It is deliberately obfuscates the fact that games aren't simple mixtures where you can just add in bits and pieces and hopes it work. They are interrelations between all their features and the choice of whether or not to add in a save system has a huge effect on things like level design and you can't claim that it is always positive. Especially as it will inherentely create diversity.
That is also part of what I meant by the fact that programming a save system is complicated. One doesn't have to put in just the save system, one has to realise how it affects the entire game and design has to accommodate this. It's very important.

As an example: Playing through old games on their original console and on emulators with a save state function is actually a completely different experience. The games have to be designed differentely to compensate and you can't claim that one system is universally better or that the two systems are totally compatible when they are in fact not.

I don't want to argue this. You've looked directly past every point I've made and, more importantly, you're clearly not budging on the subject anyway, when all that me and DFM and Lumenskir want is for you to stop complaining and just not use the quicksave.

A good way to ruin a game for me is to have a cast that's impossible to sympathize with. I can forgive a bit of bad voice acting or mistranslation so long as the cast is tolerable. I won't hold out for "good." That's actually become how I rate casts these days: degrees of tolerability.

Now, for instances where dialog or voice is so poor that it actually affects my ability to tolerate the character, there is a problem. This has made me go stir crazy during a few of my brother's rental periods. Like Shining Force Neo. There are some characters I'd have loved to shoot from that. Especially that dog. Ugh! :gonk:

But in general, the cast should not comprise of:

• People clinically incapable of getting along or interacting normally. If the team all hates each other, I'm probably not going to like them.
• A bunch of whiny toddlers. I hated Squall for that. He has more baggage than a freight train.
• A bunch of clingy wusses. I hated Rinoa for that. I loved her in battle, but the "I can't fight alone" crap annoyed me.
• Anyone annoying that I have to deal with on a mandatory basis. This includes high, squeaky voices, being nuggets for extended periods, or having annoying theme songs.
• Characters so over the top as to not be believable. If your parents are murdered, and you're a happy young swordsman with your late father's blade, you need help.

It also annoys me that the main character has to be a badass these days, but only if it's done poorly.

I hated Tales of Abyss for that. The main character whines endlessy. Oh yeah, I heard he changes in the middle of the game to a traditional RPG main character, but it turns I didn't care. Also, I'm the only person in the world to hate the battle system.

On the other side, I liked Tales of Legendia a lot, even though the battle system is extremely repetitive. And why? Because the characters, while different, didn't hate eachother so much. The main character was a jerk with everyone, but has moments of non-jerkness and becomes a normal guy by the end. Sure, some of the characters hated eachother, but it wasn't a MAJOR point of focus. The fact that I never used them may have helped that.

But, yeah, suggestion for game makers: Don't make a game where story is fucking awesome and then rape the gameplay or the other way around. We want balance between those two. Would you FFT lovers play it if it had a battle system like Hoshigami in the endgame?

( Hoshigami is fucking great but the closer to the end you are, the more it sucks. You get to a point where no matter your class, you need to use magic and to use that you need to make coins that you can't possibly know how to make a good one without making a big chart or checking a guide. )

You could do the same with any genre. And you'd probably come up with a similair ratio, too. Only difference is movie liscenses tend to be more visible than the 80,000 WW2 battle clones, or the 80,000 Doom knock-offs, or the 80,000 Tetris wannabes.

Try it! It's a fun exercise. Good way to pass the time in between levels.

I think one of the few games that was a movie-tie-in that isn't awful was Aladdin.

One of the few.

RETRO game emulators, yeah. Every time you do a save state, it saves EVERYTHING. Position, facing, hitpoints, enemy behavior, EVERYTHING. Those retro games are, what, a megabyte each? Less? I used to sneak upwards of five NES games at a time on a one-point-four-four megabyte floppy disk from the library back when my home computer had shittastic internet.

N64 games take up between 20-100 megabytes of space each on my flash drive. DS games a bit more.

Fast forward to today. Just try and imagine how much memory a Wii or PS3 or 360 game takes up, and how much memory would have to be saved EVERY TIME you did a save state. It's not so much the creators being unable to do the quicksave option. It's more a matter of there being no logistically feasible way to include it these days.

Loyal, it saves a set of variables. It doesn't create a complete image of the game when you quicksave and savestate. If it did, you'd need a Terabyte to allocate to various saves on a harddrive. In fact, it'd probably only be a bit larger than a normal save file.

Emulator savestates are bigger because the ROMs are not programmed to work that way, but several games are programmed to work that way and do it quite effectively.

Well, there goes my theory.

I just thought of something funny: If you think turn-based games are outdated, go to No Mutants Allowed and tell them how real time combat is going to make Fallout 3 awesome. :)

If any NPF forum members turn up dead because of what I'm sure you think is a cute little joke I will report you to the authorities.

Knowing them, the guys at No Mutants Allowed would probably try and shoot you in the eyes.

So let's keep an eye on the news.

I wish I saved that one post from NMA where this guy was talking about how his girlfriend said Fallout was just a game so he punched her.

Then he dumped that bitch like a sack of fertalizer.



Then they all complimented him on his restraint.

I'm hoping that you're exaggerating or maybe not picking up on the subtext due to poorly-worded and shitty grammar in their posts, but knowing Fallout fans probably not.

Found it, was actually vaguely remembering it wrong much to my surprise.

http://img120.imageshack.us/img120/8660/07290717vf9.gif

Just in case anyone thinks this is off topic, it includes two things I hate about videogames.

1. People who play videogames.

2. That Fallout 3 is going to suck so bad compared to the other two. (Even Tactics?)

Holy. Crap.

If there is one thing more mind-boggling than die-hard fanboys, it's die-hard purist fanboys.

I haven't seen a group of purists this upset since the American Godzilla movie came out. Just reading the front page is amusing. While they do post postive previews about Fallout 3, they make sure that you know that they believe in their hearts it that the game will suck, and no amount of people saying its good will convince them otherwise because it has FPS elements!

All that, and they can tell you how the plot contradicts the canon before the game is released.

I said it before, and I'll say it again.

Holy. Crap.