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(re: wasteland) I have't listened to the VGHD, but in the bunnyhop review he specifically called out object interaction (and the UI/pace of the game in general) as being extremely slow. Too many steps for something trivial that you do a whole lot of.
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Oct 4, 2014 23:28
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_jink posted:(re: wasteland) I have't listened to the VGHD, but in the bunnyhop review he specifically called out object interaction (and the UI/pace of the game in general) as being extremely slow. Too many steps for something trivial that you do a whole lot of. His criticisms on the pacing and UI are grounded but by calling it a "hotkey based interface" he establishes both the conceit and solution to the design. All those steps he listed can be done in half the time by using the hotkeys provided. Space selects/deselects the entire party. The function keys select your individual party members. The number keys select their skills. And perception is always active, there's no reason to turn it off. I can't argue that not using hotkeys makes the game especially slow and clunky but they're designed for you to use. Trying to play League of Legends or World of Warcraft without hotkeys is a nightmare but is that necessarily the fault of the game's design? al-azad fucked around with this message at 23:51 on Oct 4, 2014 |
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Oct 4, 2014 23:48
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Big Coffin Hunter posted:The original Castlevania plays nothing like Mario and is a goddamn great game. Hell, even Mega Man doesn't have the same feel. While I get why some people don't like the momentum based movement of Sonic I think 2 and 3 are great. Hell, we're even talking about cinematic platformers like Oddworld and those are some of the best games. Using "not like Mario" as a shorthand for bad controls is either lazy or close minded. Yeah I was just jokin' around. I enjoy CV1/3 and Super Ghouls n' Ghosts, which share the common factor of a lack of air control - that is, once you commit to a jump, you're committed, and if you mistimed it or an enemy moved under your landing spot you're gonna eat it. The end result is that those games are more about deliberation and timing than most Mario games are (which are forgiving in this regard) and they're all ultimately much more difficult than any Mario game I've ever played. They don't control badly, but I can see how being more punitive with jump timing would frustrate some people. It certainly frustrated me trying to beat Castlevania 3 as a kid. Ultimately I think a problem a lot of gamers (casual and ~hardcore~) and game reviewers succumb to is this idea that if something isn't "for them", it sucks or is objectively flawed. This just becomes more and more common as the games industry expands to include more types of people and content (and will continue to do so for ex. as VR and motion-based games improve and people of backgrounds other than white male computer guy continue to make inroads into design positions) and I'm really not looking forward to another twenty years of people saying Gone Home isn't a game because you can't die and Dark Souls is too hard to be fun. There is room in the world for both! Baku fucked around with this message at 00:00 on Oct 5, 2014 |
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Oct 4, 2014 23:52
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Now the first Mega Man had a legitimate control issue. Whenever Mega Man came to a stop he would slide a little as he returned to his static sprite. I overshot so many loving platforms because of this. They fixed it immediately in MM2 and I can't play the original except the PSP remake.
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Oct 5, 2014 00:05
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I got into Mega Man with the first X game. I love the heck out of that one something fierce. Jeff Gerstmann meets Mega Man 9
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Oct 5, 2014 00:24
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Zombies' Downfall posted:Yeah I was just jokin' around. Oh sorry about that, text-only and all that. But yeah I completely agree with everything you said. I'll be the first to admit I'm kind of a gaming luddite, but as long as the design of the game works with the tools and controls put in front of you a game isn't necessarily bad even if you don't feel what it's going for. For example while I love narrative based games like Gone Home and loved the new/old school mix feel of Dark Souls, I just can't really click with a lot of first person shooters and beat 'em ups like God of War. But just because I can't get into the feel for that or Bioshock I wouldn't ever call them "bad" for not being what I'm personally looking for. al-azad posted:Now the first Mega Man had a legitimate control issue. Whenever Mega Man came to a stop he would slide a little as he returned to his static sprite. I overshot so many loving platforms because of this. They fixed it immediately in MM2 and I can't play the original except the PSP remake. Not going to lie, it's been so long since I played Mega Man 1 when I think of the controls my brain just immediately thinks 2 and onward + the X games.
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Oct 5, 2014 00:28
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al-azad posted:His criticisms on the pacing and UI are grounded but by calling it a "hotkey based interface" he establishes both the conceit and solution to the design. All those steps he listed can be done in half the time by using the hotkeys provided. Space selects/deselects the entire party. The function keys select your individual party members. The number keys select their skills. And perception is always active, there's no reason to turn it off. isn't that just streamlining a bad solution? The very next point he makes is that an inclusive right-click interface would way better (and he even makes a mockup exactly how it would look). Its about reducing the number of actions required to do something trivial, not doing them all faster. (the mmo/moba comparison doesn't really apply, unless I'm missing something. You can't click UI in those genres because you're using the mouse and hotkeys simultaneously)
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Oct 5, 2014 00:37
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_jink posted:isn't that just streamlining a bad solution? The very next point he makes is that an inclusive right-click interface would way better (and he even makes a mockup exactly how it would look). Its about reducing the number of actions required to do something trivial, not doing them all faster. His solution is doing the same thing. Having a single right-click menu is just consolidating all the options for people who want to use the mouse and not the hotkeys. You still have to wait for people to run to the object and perform the skill. And most MMO/MOBAs let you click on the skill icons individually, at least League and WoW do. But doing so will get you crushed because your opponents are acting at a fraction of your time with hotkeys.
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Oct 5, 2014 01:13
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It's hard not to feel defensive in this conversation, at least a little bit. WOFF is filtered through a more experiential lens than one of serious criticism. I think we sometimes stumble onto serious criticism but most of the time we're just relaying our very subjective thoughts. Also, we've developed some shorthand through our three years of podcasting. So, when we give a game poo poo for not controlling like Mario, we don't literally mean we only like jumps that feel like Mario (we both love Castlevania, for example). What we mean is that when a game that is looking for a fun jump feel (rather than a more considered approach like Castlevania), it really feels like that problem is sort of solved already. I'm not sure if that makes sense. I just don't want anyone to think that we literally want every jump to feel like Mario.
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Oct 5, 2014 02:30
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al-azad posted:His criticisms on the pacing and UI are grounded but by calling it a "hotkey based interface" he establishes both the conceit and solution to the design. All those steps he listed can be done in half the time by using the hotkeys provided. Space selects/deselects the entire party. The function keys select your individual party members. The number keys select their skills. And perception is always active, there's no reason to turn it off. The specific thing I was talking about was a situation where there is a locked door, and an NPC gives you the key to it, say as a quest reward. The process for opening that door is: 1) Go to the character's inventory who got the key. 2) Right click the key, click [Assign to Hotkey]. 3) Go back out to the main interface. 4) Hit the hotkey number associated with the key or click its icon. 5) Click the door. Minor problem with 1: You're not always sure which character got the key. The party's inventory is pretty fungible. Maybe step 1) takes 6 keystrokes because it happened to be your sixth guy who turned in the quest. Minor problem with 2: Every single key in the game has the exact same inventory icon. I understand the interface, and I like the way skills get applied to the world in general. I just observed that this particular thing, and a few other things like it (objects in the world with only one possible action that can be performed on them, in a way that isn't a puzzle or a mechanically interesting thing) were handled a little clunkily. zapjackson fucked around with this message at 06:24 on Oct 5, 2014 |
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Oct 5, 2014 06:22
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Yeah, that's all fair. I feel that a universal keyring should be mandatory in RPGs and if you have a key it should be the first item used. Deus Ex established that and it works fine.
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Oct 5, 2014 07:55
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ElMaligno posted:However when you preface your grievance with “Don’t meant to sound like a dick”. Include phrases like “had to switch off after 40 minutes”, “I’m hugely biased”. And don’t address any of the, quite frankly, bland and milquetoast criticism Gary and Kole have about the game you come out a horrible hyperbolic passive-aggressive goony as gently caress person. You have a point, Gary and Cole have been super negative about games before that I adore, Metroid Fusion, Oddworld and Sacrifice come to mind. Then again, I don't particularly mind them giving Oddworld a hard time, as much as I loved it back in 1997 it isn't a game I could go back to in 2014 without having serious grievances. I agree terms like "I'm hugely biased" are just a way of trying to instantly write off any criticism they might have but then again the point they made about it not being a terrific shooter still stand and are indeed magnified by present day game mechanics. Their dissection of Half-Life just happened to rub me the wrong way. For the record I went back and listened to the rest of the episode and it seems that their first 40 minutes were particularly salty. Whatever, that's like their opinion man. Thanks for teaching me the word milequetoast though, I'll save that for when I want to sound like a right wanker. As for The Resi Evil remake, I'll probably send in some mail to WoFF expanding on this when you get round to the extrasodes for it but I just felt it's additions ruined the campy B movie quality and turned it into a far more serious, violent ordeal. I'm not saying it's bad, for example I think the Neptune shark scene is a thousands times better in the remake, it's just anytime I get the hankering to replay Resident Evil, it's always the original (or the DS redoing) rather than the Gamecube rearrangement. Same reason I'll always want to play original Metal Gear Solid rather than Twin Snakes. Videogames, eh.
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Oct 5, 2014 09:44
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Ramagamma posted:Thanks for teaching me the word milequetoast though, I'll save that for when I want to sound like a right wanker.
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Oct 5, 2014 09:54
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Speaking of getting rubbed the wrong way, I was shocked and appalled by the recent Evangelion bashing.
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Oct 5, 2014 10:43
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Ramagamma posted:As for The Resi Evil remake, I'll probably send in some mail to WoFF expanding on this when you get round to the extrasodes for it but I just felt it's additions ruined the campy B movie quality and turned it into a far more serious, violent ordeal. I'm not saying it's bad, for example I think the Neptune shark scene is a thousands times better in the remake, it's just anytime I get the hankering to replay Resident Evil, it's always the original (or the DS redoing) rather than the Gamecube rearrangement. The REmake would have been the perfect time to use the uncut version of RE's intro but no, not even the Director's Cut or the DS version get it.
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Oct 5, 2014 11:08
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al-azad posted:So what can be argued here? Oddworld has objectively bad controls? But within the constraints of the design it works flawlessly if you have your timing down. Do the people who can't internalize the timing have priority over the people who do? What more can be argued here? So yeah I still don't see your point with the example you came up with. It's just laziness to say entire sections of game design can't be debated - especially one so key as how a game controls!
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Oct 5, 2014 13:09
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The Thumbs CS discussion in the same week as WOFF Half-Life was a blast from the past. I definitely understand the visceral reaction to CS, as the discussion immediately brought me back to playing vanilla CS in version 0.6 or something (back when the M4 was always silenced and alt-fire zoomed in like the AUG, and the TMP was OP). I played the poo poo out of that game as a LPB taking advantage of our cable internet, and wanted to play again the second that I heard the discussion. That feedback of the green text flashing up on the screen when you get money for a kill is so addictive. I could see the pump shotty in my hands and remembered the exact key sequences for buying armor and the shotgun or AUG. CS:GO is now on my wishlist to say the least.
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Oct 6, 2014 04:04
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I preordered HL2 just to get my hands on CS:Source sooner.
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Oct 6, 2014 05:38
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Akuma posted:Zuh? Whether or not controls should adhere slavishly to a rigid design at the potential expense of fun and understanding in a large portion of the playerbase? This is exactly the sort of thing that can be debated! Right off the bat I can cite the example of Flashback that has the same grid structure but doesn't suffer from this problem because it lets you press the jump and hold it at any point before reaching the jump part of the block, but the blocks are spaced sufficiently that it's very intuitive to time your jumps how you want. Oddworld does the same thing. I just played it to make sure I wasn't crazy. If you hold down jump you will jump forward infinitely. The window of opportunity is definitely smaller because Flashback runs at like 5 frames per second. And if that rigid design is applied universally or is inherent to the core building blocks of the game what more can I say? I remember all the hate Resident Evil 4 got because you couldn't move and shoot but the game was built around that by giving you relatively slow enemies and wide open arenas to run around in. On the other hand Resident Evil 5 had the same gameplay structure but smaller levels, more enemies, more agile enemies, and a mandatory second character. A simple change in the way levels are designed breaks the flow of the game.
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Oct 6, 2014 09:48
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Gary and Kole, I'm too lazy to check, but did you guys mention how the tram ride opening of Half-Life essentially became the de facto standard for video game intros? I listened to this episode while playing Alien: Isolation and it was eerie to see it use the same "combat-free setup of the game world before everything gets hosed" concept.
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Oct 6, 2014 18:05
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al-azad posted:And if that rigid design is applied universally or is inherent to the core building blocks of the game what more can I say? I remember all the hate Resident Evil 4 got because you couldn't move and shoot but the game was built around that by giving you relatively slow enemies and wide open arenas to run around in. On the other hand Resident Evil 5 had the same gameplay structure but smaller levels, more enemies, more agile enemies, and a mandatory second character. A simple change in the way levels are designed breaks the flow of the game. it's like none of you ever play games with friends or something
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Oct 6, 2014 18:11
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The Vosgian Beast posted:While we're airing out old WOFF grievances [...] Sacrifice [...] Oh gently caress, I knew there was something I'd been meaning to do still.
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Oct 6, 2014 18:35
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bobservo posted:Gary and Kole, I'm too lazy to check, but did you guys mention how the tram ride opening of Half-Life essentially became the de facto standard for video game intros? I listened to this episode while playing Alien: Isolation and it was eerie to see it use the same "combat-free setup of the game world before everything gets hosed" concept. I think we said it was influential but neither of us play enough shooters to remark that it's quite that ubiquitous.
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Oct 6, 2014 19:39
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Caitlin posted:it's like none of you ever play games with friends or something That doesn't fix the cramped level design and more agile enemies. The design template for RE5 must have been a selection of long, twisty corridors with shoulder width loops like a Sonic the Hedgehog level viewed from above. RE5 even copies over the introductory timed mob wave like RE4's seminal village but it's half the size, has twice as many enemies, and doesn't set any kind of atmospheric precedent like RE4 did. Both games have a nearly identical opening and it does so much to show you how tonally off Capcom got with the series. And I'll never forget how the game turns into Gears of War in the last 1/3 because what Resident Evil always needed is guys armed with rocket launchers and machine guns.
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Oct 6, 2014 21:45
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al-azad posted:And I'll never forget how the game turns into Gears of War in the last 1/3 because what Resident Evil always needed is guys armed with rocket launchers and machine guns. The last leg of 4 was the same way. Krauser's men are armed to the teeth. 5 was the same but more.
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Oct 6, 2014 22:07
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Song For The Deaf posted:The last leg of 4 was the same way. Krauser's men are armed to the teeth. 5 was the same but more. Yeah, I remember now. But like you said I don't remember it being particularly long. Actually forget what I said about RE5 being similar in the beginning, it's almost a mirror of RE4 but smaller in scale with twice as many enemies.
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Oct 6, 2014 22:14
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Song For The Deaf posted:The last leg of 4 was the same way. Krauser's men are armed to the teeth. 5 was the same but more. I wasn't annoyed by that section because it was one of RE4's many gameplay "twists" to break you out of your comfort zone and have you try out different strategies against a new threat—I remember having a lot of fun with trying to take out those beefy mini-gun dudes.
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Oct 6, 2014 23:02
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bobservo posted:I wasn't annoyed by that section because it was one of RE4's many gameplay "twists" to break you out of your comfort zone and have you try out different strategies against a new threat—I remember having a lot of fun with trying to take out those beefy mini-gun dudes. Me too. I think RE4 is sort of about variety and RE5 is about sticking with the worst parts of 4. RE6 goes back to the "anything goes" philosophy but isn't a great game. That said, both 5 and 6 are great fun co-op as long as you don't care about the story.
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Oct 6, 2014 23:06
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Woffle posted:Me too. I think RE4 is sort of about variety and RE5 is about sticking with the worst parts of 4. That's a good assessment. For me, RE6 is "Let's do what other AAA games are doing, but without understanding why they're doing it."
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Oct 6, 2014 23:16
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bobservo posted:That's a good assessment. For me, RE6 is "Let's do what other AAA games are doing, but without understanding why they're doing it." Just RE6? That's about 50% of big-budget Japanese game design from last gen in a nutshell.
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Oct 8, 2014 03:11
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Osmosisch posted:Oh gently caress, I knew there was something I'd been meaning to do still. Your chickens have come to roost, Gary and Cole!
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Oct 8, 2014 04:17
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Al! posted:Your chickens have come to roost, Gary and Cole! [sarcasm] Well, we've made it on the internet for quite a while without people attacking us about video games. Our luck was going to run out eventually. [/sarcasm]
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Oct 8, 2014 06:19
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Great ME:SoM and A:I discussion in this weeks Thumbs, though it's a shame that (as usual) they've only played an hour or so of either. In this case, their complaints about Talion's character in ME:SoM are somewhat ameliorated by the game making it abundantly clear in it's full course that he is absolutely no better than the Orcs/Uruks he slaughters. Also by that game being super loving awesome. And I really can't wait for companies to stop trying to turn 30 minutes of film into 20 hours of game. A:I is just the latest offender, I'm tired of games taking the most self-indulgent and overbearing Michael Bay shitfest action-barf and apparently thinking "eh, could have been 4 times as long". Pasco fucked around with this message at 12:03 on Oct 8, 2014 |
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Oct 8, 2014 11:49
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Speaking of Idle Thumbs, this is something I didn't even know I wanted until I saw it on Twitter tonight, but I'm pretty sure it's going to be my favorite thing. I hope they get Steve Gaynor on for an episode.
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Oct 8, 2014 12:07
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Pasco posted:And I really can't wait for companies to stop trying to turn 30 minutes of film into 20 hours of game. A:I is just the latest offender, I'm tired of games taking the most self-indulgent and overbearing Michael Bay shitfest action-barf and apparently thinking "eh, could have been 4 times as long". Do you mean Alien: Isolation? I haven't played it but it sounds like the complete opposite of what I'd call an "overbearing Michael Bay shitfest action-barf". PaletteSwappedNinja fucked around with this message at 12:18 on Oct 8, 2014 |
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Oct 8, 2014 12:13
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Randallteal posted:I didn't even know I wanted until I saw it on Twitter tonight, but I'm pretty sure it's going to be my favorite thing. this so much
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Oct 8, 2014 12:36
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I've never actually seen twin peaks. There has to be some cheap but legal way of doing it. Just checking amazon it's £20 for 2 series which is pretty fair I suppose.
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Oct 8, 2014 12:45
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I don't get why people rave about Twin Peaks, I gave the first few episodes a shot maybe a decade or so ago and it looked horribly aged then.
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Oct 8, 2014 12:56
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in what way is it aged? production values? many people like it or at least liked way back when because, it was a TV series made by David Lynch, as such there was nothing quite like it at that time. now we have all kinds of poo poo so it might not be particularly impressive. still a good watch (at least season 1) not just for nostalgia but for Lynch fans.
Gesadt fucked around with this message at 13:15 on Oct 8, 2014 |
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Oct 8, 2014 13:10
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Yeah, it's worth remembering that this was a TV show on at the same time big ratings winners included The Cosby Show, Murphy Brown, and Cheers. By modern TV standards Twin Peaks might not seem like much, but at the time that poo poo was unexpected, to say the least.
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Oct 8, 2014 13:14
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