After replaying all the Bioshocks, I think the story of Bioshock 2 is better than Infinite. Sofia Lamb is a better villain by far than Comstock. She's no Andrew Ryan but she isn't that far off. Also, I find myself caring about Eleanor more than I ever did about Elizabeth. Actually, I'll go as far to say Bioshock 2 is criminally under rated compared to Infinite.
It lacks the iconic scenes and characters of Bioshock 1, but it really has the best protagonist with Delta.
Over time, I came to believe that Arkham Origins is the overall best game in the Arkham series. It has the best bosses, the best story, the best joker, the best cutscenes, the best side quests, and the most meaningful dialogues.
and I believe that the "lack of innovation" is a weird excuse to bash on that game. Arkham city wasn't that much innovative, and it actually graded back on some of the things that made Asylum a great cornerstone of a series to begin with.
Arkham Asylum offered an unmatchable atmosphere but it lacked in story and side content.
As for Arkham Knight, to this day, I can't bring myself to try it. Adding a tank and making Deathstroke a vehicle boss killed all hype. And I am really frightened it will turn me off on the series altogether even though it is one of the favorite series of all time.
Over time, I came to believe that Arkham Origins is the overall best game in the Arkham series. It has the best bosses, the best story, the best joker, the best cutscenes, the best side quests, and the most meaningful dialogues.
and I believe that the "lack of innovation" is a weird excuse to bash on that game. Arkham city wasn't that much innovative, and it actually graded back on some of the things that made Asylum a great cornerstone of a series to begin with.
Arkham Asylum offered an unmatchable atmosphere but it lacked in story and side content.
As for Arkham Knight, to this day, I can't bring myself to try it. Adding a tank and making Deathstroke a vehicle boss killed all hype. And I am really frightened it will turn me off on the series altogether even though it is one of the favorite series of all time.
Well, I at last got some hands on time with Nintendo Switch and...
Wtf is this shit man. This thing is barely usable.
A,B,X,Y buttons are tiny - smaller than even the face buttons of the blue, red, white, cosmos black 3DS. And those shoulder and trigger buttons. Tiny, thin strips that, again, they're barely usable.
And, unnaturally, holding two thin strips of controllers at the edge whilst holding a tablet-like device. It's like holding a thin dessert plate. Pretty unnatural and unevenly weighted.
The screen is pretty meh and has huge black bezel surrounding it.
Probably, the most disappointing N hardware I've ever used.
Still, at least I didn't create an entire thread about it; unlike those weirdo N fans who will create an entire thread when they so much as fart when playing a Switch game. p
Nier: Automata is a decent game but not GOTY material. Its combat mechanics are decent at best but most of the time they are garbage mainly because the majority of the game you fight same monsters over and over again who are already push overs to begin with so you never have to do anything other than spamming dodge. The game's difficulty is fucked as well. Entirely too easy on normal but too punishing on hard or very hard because of the lack of checkpoints. I also cannot understand why it is checkpointed the way it is. It doesn't save your progress without accessing save points in the world expect for the times it does. So inconsistent. The majority of the bosses are garbage. Open world is boring. The side quests are boring and only give you a bit of lore not all of them and almost all of them are fetch quests/escort missions. The only saving grace for this game is its story, which is good, but not life altering nor does it make me ignore all the other issues the game has. I'll probably get flamed for this but its just an average game to me.
I completely agree. I had a friend go on this pretentious ass rant about how nier automata is the greatest of all time and how it takes a hot dump all over FF15. And while I know I'll get flamed for this I enjoyed FF15 more than nier automata. I had fun with FF15, warts and all.
Playing on assisted controls in FIFA is like using training wheels. It makes me laugh watching FUT comps and see these guys pull of impossible shots acting like the CPU isn't aiming for them.
Over time, I came to believe that Arkham Origins is the overall best game in the Arkham series. It has the best bosses, the best story, the best joker, the best cutscenes, the best side quests, and the most meaningful dialogues.
and I believe that the "lack of innovation" is a weird excuse to bash on that game. Arkham city wasn't that much innovative, and it actually graded back on some of the things that made Asylum a great cornerstone of a series to begin with.
Arkham Asylum offered an unmatchable atmosphere but it lacked in story and side content.
As for Arkham Knight, to this day, I can't bring myself to try it. Adding a tank and making Deathstroke a vehicle boss killed all hype. And I am really frightened it will turn me off on the series altogether even though it is one of the favorite series of all time.
Avalanche Studios are a superb developer.
Just Cause 3 and Mad Max have given me more gaming enjoyment than just about any other titles from any other developers.
red dead redemption is a terrible open world game and everything about it is boring... the protagonist, the story, the forgettable NPC's, the missions, the giant empty world that somehow gets MORE boring as the game goes on and mexico is introduced. i will never understand the praise this title gets and i am baffled by the excitement for a sequel.
Avalanche Studios are a superb developer.
Just Cause 3 and Mad Max have given me more gaming enjoyment than just about any other titles from any other developers.
Yeah it runs at like 20 fps on ps4. Really disappointing because I loved Just Cause 2 and I don't remember it running this poorly. Come to think of it, I don't think Mad Max ran this bad either. No idea what happened with this game. It just runs bad unless you can brute force it.
red dead redemption is a terrible open world game and everything about it is boring... the protagonist, the story, the forgettable NPC's, the missions, the giant empty world that somehow gets MORE boring as the game goes on and mexico is introduced. i will never understand the praise this title gets and i am baffled by the excitement for a sequel.
Life Is Strange is one of the best and most creative stories I've experienced, but gamers don't appreciate it because they're too used to games that give you a "happy ending" as long as you meet some certain condition, and Life Is Strange doesn't do that. They're also not used to stories with heavy allegorical themes and are too focused on narrative (as many film and TV fans these days are).
The issues and controversy around this game and its ending make a lot more sense if you think of Life Is Strange as an "interactive movie" and not a video game, in the sense that a "game" is defined as a competitive activity with a defined win condition. It's a strong case for why we need more language to describe "video games" that aren't really games, as the field of video games continues to expand to include new and different types of experiences.
red dead redemption is a terrible open world game and everything about it is boring... the protagonist, the story, the forgettable NPC's, the missions, the giant empty world that somehow gets MORE boring as the game goes on and mexico is introduced. i will never understand the praise this title gets and i am baffled by the excitement for a sequel.
The worst part for me was how every mission ended with "well, thanks for the help, we're riding back to town now, good luck returning home from the middle of fucking nowhere. Bye!"
> GTA, Batman games, Skyrim, Read Dead Redemption, and every Ubisoft open-world games are all boring trash
> All Platinum games really really suck in all the major ways (gameplay, visuals, and music)
> 2B is trash-tier design
> Telltale games are garbage
> Overwatch is ugly
> Dark Souls 2 was the best game of 2014 by far
> 999 has an insultingly stupid story and shite writing. Since story is all it has going for it, it's therefore a worthless game
> Final Fantasy Tactics was the last good Final Fantasy
> Xenoblade Chronicles is a stupid, boring slog
> Nintendo is overrated
> A Link to the Past is the only truly great Zelda game
> Hyrule Warriors is more fun than any Zelda game outside of LttP
> Borderlands 2 is a great game, and it has many funny moments
> The new Tomb Raider games are insulting garbage
> The "lore" in Dark Souls games is not really that interesting at all
> Hideo Kojima is a misogynistic hack
Really thought I was alone in this. Hearing this shite after the glorious, moody, atmospheric, beautiful music of Super Metroid was such a disappointment.
You say that but playing with friends the outcome is pretty much given based on how many hours of Mario Kart we have played. I'll agree on it not being fun, but that's because the distance between us when playing is so big that it feels like a single player game, instead of 4 player. And if I want a single player experience in Mario Kart I'd rather be doing time trials.
> GTA, Batman games, Skyrim, Read Dead Redemption, and every Ubisoft open-world games are all boring trash
> All platinum games really really suck in all the majo0r ways (gameplay, visuals, and music)
> 2B is trash-tier design
> Telltale games are garbage
> Overwatch is ugly
> Dark Souls 2 was the best game of 2014 by far
> 999 has an insultingly stupid story and shite writing. Since story is all it has going for it, it's therefore a worthless game
> Final Fantasy Tactics was the last good Final Fantasy
> Xenoblade Chronicles is a stupid, boring slog
> Nintendo is overrated
> A Link to the Past is the only truly great Zelda game
> Hyrule Warriors is more fun than any Zelda game outside of LttP
> Borderlands 2 is a great game, and it has many funny moments
> The new Tomb Raider games are insulting garbage
> The "lore" in Dark Souls games is not really that interesting at all
> Hideo Kojima is a misogynistic hack
The only good FF. This series is often extremely deficient in gameplay, they're mostly vehicles for cringy stories and unbelievably awful character designs.
He reached gaming cult of personality status, so now it's impossible to have a proper discussion about the shortcomings of his games. On top of that, I think you're extremely incompetent if you need a decade and bottomless pockets to make a good game. Plenty of amazing games are made with realistic budgets and deadlines - many of them with good character designs!
Really thought I was alone in this. Hearing this shite after the glorious, moody, atmospheric, beautiful music of Super Metroid was such a disappointment.
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance and A2 were better games than the original and have more memorable characters. The original's story while good, is overrated and had a weak final act.
The Wii U Pro Controller is awful. The stick placement is wrong and it feels worse to hold than every other 1st party controller for the last 2 generations.
A Link to the Past is one of the weaker 2D Zelda games. The Gameboy games are all much better.
Donkey Kong 64 is not only a great game, it's one of the best collectathons ever made.
Super Mario Galaxy was only "good" and was a huge step down from 64 and Sunshine.
Resident Evil 6 was better than RE5 in every way.
Branching stories and multiple endings in games is a bad thing and I often avoid buying games that do this.
I personally did not like BotW overall game-design and have a hard time understanding why everyone loves the game so much. I am saying this after two complete playthroughs of the game. I am going to try to explain this opinion in detail.
The game does a number of things extremely well, but the "global" game-design does not give the player any good reason to explore. I felt demotivated very fast.
The simple fact of "looking at places and be WOWed" does not work with me. If their is a good scenery to look at, okay that's great, but this is not what excites me in a video-game.
To have fun in a game, I need the game to give me reasons to go further. BotW is all about exploration. How is exploration rewarded in BotW ? With sanctuaries. A shit-ton of sanctuaries. Sanctuaries fall flat in terms of player fun. A lot of them are only "Offerings" with nothing to do, a lot of them are "a single fight" and that's it. Finally, the others, are simple puzzle, often very short. And that's it.
Sanctuaries offer no fun to me.
Finding them can be fun. Some of them have pretty interesting puzzles to solve etc... But that's only some of them. This is actually the funnest part of the game.
How developers failed at designing a real open world that gives liberty, and make it interesting :
Let's say you can go anywhere any time. A question comes to mind : how do you handle the game's difficulty ? You can obviously fix the difficulty, but then the player is not free anymore. Some places will be way to hard.
So you make the choice to have it adapt dynamically. In BotW, the difficulty gets higher as much as you become stronger. So you could think that this is good design. But how does this give me the motivation to become stronger ? It does not.
Why should I make the game any harder by exploring, killing enemies and doing sanctuaries ? The game fails at rewarding me with anything meaningful each time I explore it.
Something meaningful would be : discovering a new dungeon, finding a new item that offers new exploration possibilities. Doing this requires work, and you have to think of all the ways each dungeon can be explored at each possible moments of the adventure.
If you do it well, then the dungeon might have 3 or 4 distinct paths, depending on the items the player has. And the enemies would get stronger depending on the player's strength.
Because this is actually difficult to do, in BotW, they did not do it. This is why there is nothing of interest to discover. Each sanctuary will be something like "use 2 or 3 weapons to find 2 or 3 weapons". What's the point ?
This is why each sanctuary also gives you pretty artificial secondary thing : a small upgrade to your character. This is probably the only meaningful way that the developers came up with to keep a "meaningful" reward to doing the sanctuaries.
And then, they completely dodged the fact of doing a real intelligent game design by using :
- adaptive difficulty in the outside world (which really is making enemies a bit stronger and that's it)
- 4 dungeons that are only puzzles (they are nothing more than big sanctuaries in the end)
- no enemies in the 4 dungeons (useless trash that you one hit kill does not count) (no need to handle difficulty levels, except for the boss, which I am not even sure are scaled in difficulty)
- all items to progress in the game are found in the mandatory 1 hour of the game
- all weapons are breakable, and none is mandatory or offer a real advantage
To me, BotW is freedom poorly implemented and never rewards the player with things that are actually interesting. This is lazy game-design.
2 has a fantastic self contained story, but aside from the neat symbolism, most other aspects are eh. It was never scary aside from Pyramid Head, who was also the only really cool monster. Mandarins were neat but used again(and better) in 3 as Closers.
2 dropping the religious horror aspect made it a lot less interesting in the long run, as besides one "joke" ending, it doesnt share the rest of the series mythos.
1 was, and still is weirdly, way more oppressive and shocking to play through, with much better Otherworld design.
3 has Heather Mason, one of the best horror game protagonists. It also has by far the best monster design, music, art, Otherworld, etc. But most importantly, its SCARY.
4s ideas were honestly way cooler than the game could really deliver on, but it tried and the 21 Sacraments were a really cool central plot. Too bad about the escort mission second half, though :/
The other games cant really compare because theyre all varying degrees of mediocrity(though origins was okay aside from travis and kaufman/lisa)
Im not the best at writing out the hows/whys but its all subjective anyway. I see Silent Hill as heavily religious horror with lots of psychological aspects, but the most vocal/active fans like the latter and DESPISE the former, which is stupid when the series started as and is majority religious horror.
I like Tom Hulett, and I dont blame him for the quality of the games, but I do blame him for doing everything he can to completely ignore the original vision and mythology to the point where he and Sam Barlow literally remade Silent Hill 1 so it didnt have the Cult. Then Downpour was just trying to do 2 again and continued to ignore it.
Also Mary Elizabeth McGlynn was the best part of the soundtracks
> GTA, Batman games, Skyrim, Read Dead Redemption, and every Ubisoft open-world games are all boring trash
> All Platinum games really really suck in all the major ways (gameplay, visuals, and music)
> 2B is trash-tier design
> Telltale games are garbage
> Overwatch is ugly
> Dark Souls 2 was the best game of 2014 by far
> 999 has an insultingly stupid story and shite writing. Since story is all it has going for it, it's therefore a worthless game
> Final Fantasy Tactics was the last good Final Fantasy
> Xenoblade Chronicles is a stupid, boring slog
> Nintendo is overrated
> A Link to the Past is the only truly great Zelda game
> Hyrule Warriors is more fun than any Zelda game outside of LttP
> Borderlands 2 is a great game, and it has many funny moments
> The new Tomb Raider games are insulting garbage
> The "lore" in Dark Souls games is not really that interesting at all
> Hideo Kojima is a misogynistic hack
I personally did not like BotW overall game-design and have a hard time understanding why everyone loves the game so much. I am saying this after two complete playthroughs of the game. I am going to try to explain this opinion in detail.
The game does a number of things extremely well, but the "global" game-design does not give the player any good reason to explore. I felt demotivated very fast.
The simple fact of "looking at places and be WOWed" does not work with me. If their is a good scenery to look at, okay that's great, but this is not what excites me in a video-game.
To have fun in a game, I need the game to give me reasons to go further. BotW is all about exploration. How is exploration rewarded in BotW ? With sanctuaries. A shit-ton of sanctuaries. Sanctuaries fall flat in terms of player fun. A lot of them are only "Offerings" with nothing to do, a lot of them are "a single fight" and that's it. Finally, the others, are simple puzzle, often very short. And that's it.
Sanctuaries offer no fun to me.
Finding them can be fun. Some of them have pretty interesting puzzles to solve etc... But that's only some of them. This is actually the funnest part of the game.
How developers failed at designing a real open world that gives liberty, and make it interesting :
Let's say you can go anywhere any time. A question comes to mind : how do you handle the game's difficulty ? You can obviously fix the difficulty, but then the player is not free anymore. Some places will be way to hard.
So you make the choice to have it adapt dynamically. In BotW, the difficulty gets higher as much as you become stronger. So you could think that this is good design. But how does this give me the motivation to become stronger ? It does not.
Why should I make the game any harder by exploring, killing enemies and doing sanctuaries ? The game fails at rewarding me with anything meaningful each time I explore it.
Something meaningful would be : discovering a new dungeon, finding a new item that offers new exploration possibilities. Doing this requires work, and you have to think of all the ways each dungeon can be explored at each possible moments of the adventure.
If you do it well, then the dungeon might have 3 or 4 distinct paths, depending on the items the player has. And the enemies would get stronger depending on the player's strength.
Because this is actually difficult to do, in BotW, they did not do it. This is why there is nothing of interest to discover. Each sanctuary will be something like "use 2 or 3 weapons to find 2 or 3 weapons". What's the point ?
This is why each sanctuary also gives you pretty artificial secondary thing : a small upgrade to your character. This is probably the only meaningful way that the developers came up with to keep a "meaningful" reward to doing the sanctuaries.
And then, they completely dodged the fact of doing a real intelligent game design by using :
- adaptive difficulty in the outside world (which really is making enemies a bit stronger and that's it)
- 4 dungeons that are only puzzles (they are nothing more than big sanctuaries in the end)
- no enemies in the 4 dungeons (useless trash that you one hit kill does not count) (no need to handle difficulty levels, except for the boss, which I am not even sure are scaled in difficulty)
- all items to progress in the game are found in the mandatory 1 hour of the game
- all weapons are breakable, and none is mandatory or offer a real advantage
To me, BotW is freedom poorly implemented and never rewards the player with things that are actually interesting. This is lazy game-design.
> GTA, Batman games, Skyrim, Read Dead Redemption, and every Ubisoft open-world games are all boring trash
> All Platinum games really really suck in all the major ways (gameplay, visuals, and music)
> 2B is trash-tier design
> Telltale games are garbage
> Overwatch is ugly
> Dark Souls 2 was the best game of 2014 by far
> 999 has an insultingly stupid story and shite writing. Since story is all it has going for it, it's therefore a worthless game
> Final Fantasy Tactics was the last good Final Fantasy
> Xenoblade Chronicles is a stupid, boring slog
> Nintendo is overrated
> A Link to the Past is the only truly great Zelda game
> Hyrule Warriors is more fun than any Zelda game outside of LttP
> Borderlands 2 is a great game, and it has many funny moments
> The new Tomb Raider games are insulting garbage
> The "lore" in Dark Souls games is not really that interesting at all
> Hideo Kojima is a misogynistic hack
Life Is Strange is one of the best and most creative stories I've experienced, but gamers don't appreciate it because they're too used to games that give you a "happy ending" as long as you meet some certain condition, and Life Is Strange doesn't do that. They're also not used to stories with heavy allegorical themes and are too focused on narrative (as many film and TV fans these days are).
The issues and controversy around this game and its ending make a lot more sense if you think of Life Is Strange as an "interactive movie" and not a video game, in the sense that a "game" is defined as a competitive activity with a defined win condition. It's a strong case for why we need more language to describe "video games" that aren't really games, as the field of video games continues to expand to include new and different types of experiences.
I dont know, I feel like the Save Chloe is a pretty good ending in a selfish way. Maxs family is super okay and Chloe is alive.
Although I disagree with why most gamers hate it. Sexism and this weird hate for "millenials" a ton have plays into it, plus the still pretty strong bias against these kinds of story games a lot have.
Its seen as even more of an "SJW" game than Undertale is from what Ive seen.
Witcher 3's story, characters and voice acting are worse than Witcher 2. Also, I prefer Witcher 2's character models (in terms of appeal/design).
Mass Effect 3 is the best Mass Effect game.
Dead or Alive 3 is a great fighting game.
Dragon Age Inquisition is great.
p
