[img]http://www.oldiesrising.com/images_testsv3/Nintendo%20Game%20Boy/Alien%203/Alien%2031.jpg[/img]

I was listening to the 20th Anniversary OST of Castlevania and noticed that one of the tunes was from a Gameboy iteration of the series Castlevania: The Adventure. Curiousity piqued, I booted up ye' ol' emulator and had to scroll through about 20,000 games alphabetically to reach it. And as if by fate, stopped on Alien 3 - booting it up I thought "well, this should be fun!"

The game plops you into the over world of Alien 3 with skinhead criminals / monks walking across the landscape, ignoring mechanics such as collision detection and clipping in and out. Whats more, the game world itself is composed of the same few palettes, taking maybe 45 seconds to fully explore its entirety.

From here, you can enter man holes / climb down ladders that take you either to fans that push you around in a rather simple minded puzzle or to areas decorated with alien slime and eggs (try to not actually touch the eggs or your life bar will fall off the chart in about five seconds.) Interestingly, the more time spent playing the game, the more aliens start to appear: at first its a sort of oscillating, multi tailed version of the face hugger (that doesn't actually grapple with you) and then after a few minutes it is screen upon screen of the full on Xenomorph.

Which doesn't play well with the story considering there were two aliens in the entire thing - one in Ripley and another that morphed from a dog I think.

Anyway.... Throughout your overworld adventure, cut scenes randomly appear detailing some aspect of the story:

[img]http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-VH95Kh1McZI/Un7BaOklxEI/AAAAAAAAOp8/KTORpGZxIDM/s320/alien+3+game+boy+9.9.jpg[/img]

But lets make it clear: there are no obvious guns, ammo, health power ups, or crates to open. Even though one of the cut scenes notes that "the crate with the key to the weapons is in the armory," Well..... I'm not sure where else it could be.

With no power ups, but slots noting how much ammo and what weapons you (don't) have in your inventory, to be found, the game is pretty ho hum until you eventually die after four or five minutes.

[img]https://i.ytimg.com/vi/cUlzHa8RZtM/hqdefault.jpg[/img]

And then its 1. Game Over (Man, Game Over!) and 2. Where I stopped playing the game.

[quote="pinback"]Pass. Because the rules aren't complicated enough for you. Look, there's plenty of reasons to quit Oil Rush, and that's just not a good one. [/quote]

There are flash games that have the exact same mechanics and do it far more competently, yet they still can only justify maybe an hour of my time over the course of a week. I'm not expecting Starcraft here, but I'd hope for some nuance.

[quote="pinback"]Skip the campaign, of course. Any campaign where you're some dude named "Kevin" is not a good campaign.[/quote]

Agreed: trite story + cut scenes that look as if they were pulled from 1998 do not enamor me.

[quote="pinback"]Skip the campaign, of course. Any campaign where you're some dude named "Kevin" is not a good campaign.[/quote]

=(

[quote="Retro"]Oil Rush!: If I master 90% of the mechanics of a game by the second tutorial mission, likely there isn't much else left for me to explore.

Pass.[/quote]

Pass. Because the rules aren't complicated enough for you. Look, there's plenty of reasons to quit Oil Rush, and that's just not a good one.

Here is the best one:

The game was made to show off their shiny new graphics engine, but to [i]play[/i] the game, at least well, requires that you spend the entire time staring at the tiny little monochrome minimap in the corner of the screen.

So they made it to show off a graphics engine that nobody would be looking at while they were using it.

There. That's a good reason to quit.

I find the game terribly relaxing when I need a quick RTS fix and don't have the energy to actually expend any effort.

Skip the campaign, of course. Any campaign where you're some dude named "Kevin" is not a good campaign.

I thought from the review I read of the latest Sly Cooper game that it was a side scrolling platformer. I thought it sounded great so I bought the entire Sly Cooper collection off PSN.

It's not a side scroller. It's a 3D platformer. 3D platformers are the worst things on Earth. I always end up fighting the camera controls way more than playing the game. This game has been infuriating from the get go. Due to camera issues but also because of it's old school style of lives, continues and terrible checkpoints.

I got 33% done. By this point I was already thinking that if I got to 50% done I'd call that a win and quit the game. Instead at 33% I got to a section where I replayed one 2-3 minute section over and over again for 40 minutes and I had enough. I do not want my death certificate to read "Heart attack due to playing Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus."

Oil Rush!: If I master 90% of the mechanics of a game by the second tutorial mission, likely there isn't much else left for me to explore.

Pass.

F.E.A.R. 2 introduces a rather underwhelming story hook in the very first part that was obviously trying to serve as a reason "to care" and draw in the player, but it wasn't very well placed because:

1. I do not know and am thus nearly incapable of caring about the characters, much less the world they live in.

2. This intro scene introduces a few key game concepts that are repeated without variation over the next hour.

3. Difficulty even on normal is very artificial, as enemies essentially just jump and round from corners making it impossible to react until they engage you.

I'm OKAY with a game slowly developing a story, a few key concepts, or even requiring me to invest time and thought to care, but I guess for Graphics First games, pacing isn't important. And for the record, I really dislike the writing "hook" or slingshot that stories take to keep someone reading or engaged: it gets boring after awhile seeing it in novel after novel.

Adam Cadre has a thing where he has said that every game he plays must provide a reason NOT to quit.

1) It may not have been Adam
2) It may have only been text games
3) It may not have actually been for games

So it could be Edgar Martinez talking about when he knows he's finished laying the pipe to his wife.

The point is, a lot of games that are engine and graphics-first give you no early reason to go on.

AAA games are kind of a wasteland, though. Don't hit me for that statement!

When I stopped playing F.E.A.R. 2: when it became obvious that the second level is nothing more than a rats nest with no discernable plot nor path to the end. Seriously, I've been running around this hospital for the last hour waiting for the plot to advance, instead I've been receiving mysterious radio transmissions pushing me on.

All I'm asking is for a little variety here or a reason to care!

Okay, that is a fair assessment in regards to misuse of the word and I'll actually use it appropriately. To be fair, my complaint is about an ill designed portion of the map / system that caused an unexpected consequence that ate away at an hour of my life, so I'm allowed to be a [i]wee bit[/i] pissy about it.

I am just so sick of the word "broken" being used by gamers. It's become such a crutch and used for anything. This game has a glitch, it's BROKEN!!! This boss is too hard, this game is BROKEN!!! I despise the word at this point and it makes my teeth itch when I hear it.

I played Motorstorm today.

I stopped playing Motorstorm today.

It took 10 tries to finally qualify, place 3rd, in the first race and then I tried the second race 5 times and never finished over 7th. This is not the racing game I am looking for.

The fact that enemies were able to shoot me / hit me with a rocket through a staircase during the Asteroid X57 mission, means the [i]MAPS[/i] are broken, which equates to me being annoyed because it wasn't readily apparent that a broken collision system was to blame.

But I stopped playing ME1 because I now need to manually break down 90% of my inventory into omnigel (there isn't a batch option), because I'm in the middle of the last major mission and would like to grab the high level loot on offer.

I was happy about the "server maintenance" because I got all pissed off when you said Mass Effect was broken and I didn't need to get in another argument.

And I'd go back and edit it if I could!

Seriously though, not sure what to call "maintenance" that results in rolling back the state of a system.

Did Retro put "server maintenance" in sneer quotes at the beginning of this thread? Is that what I FUCKING SEE?

PS3 sidebar: Why can't the controllers be totally customizable? Sure there's the standard config right out of the game box but would it kill the game makers to let us decide what's better for us?


THE
RETRAIN THE DIGITS
AARDVARK

Well, it took 45 minutes for me to quit Rainbow Six Vegas. OMG it's terrible. I had a bad feeling when I could barely read the writing on the loading screens. The graphics are so muddy and terrible that it's unplayable. I can't believe this was a game made for this gen. It looks like last gen. The hud is barely readable. You can't make out the enemies because they all blend into the background. And playing shooters on PS3 is always terrible because they don't use the trigger buttons to shoot. I'm constantly pulling the trigger to shoot and instead tossing grenades and getting shot like an idiot.

I officially gave up when I died the first time and the checkpoint was an area I passed 20 minutes previously.

I find the majority of first person shooters from that era are really hard to go back and play these days. Any FPS from the early 2000s I either find too ugly looking to play, too frustrating, or the shooting mechanics feel archaic.

I loved Halo. I went back and tried to play that when the Anniversary Edition came out and I couldn't stand it. I spent more time being frustrated than anything else. Design decisions that felt normal and familiar back then now come off as puzzling and annoying. I asked myself many times HOW DID YOU EVER LIVE THROUGH THIS??

I've went back and played other shooters from that period and they're just awful. I'm afraid to go back and play MoH Allied Assault because I don't want to think that game I wasted so many hours on sucked.

Tomorrow I'm going to start playing Rainbow Six Vegas again. I loved that game too. I hope it doesn't suck.

I've heard praise for FEAR 2, but I just do not understand why the series has become so iconic (the "little girl walking behind a soldier crawling on the ground and leaving a trail of blood" thing) as the first game is god damn frustrating and reminiscent of Daikatana if not anything else.