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Have You Hit a Gaming Wall?
Stephen Totilo, at MTV Games, has hit a gaming wall. At the newly un-flashed Multiplayer site he talks about the bane of gamers everywhere, what developer Jamie Fristrom calls a 'shelf-level event': a gaming wall that makes it hard if not impossible to complete a game. While a lot of gamers can overcome difficulties to reach the end credits, there are some frustrations that can suck all the fun out of play. He cites the bosses from Final Fantasy X and Super Paper Mario as dealbreakers. I personally am playing through God of War again, and the incredibly frustrating spear trap in the 'Paths of Madness' section of the game never fails to provoke hysterics. Have you run into any such obstacles lately? What game obstacles have caused you toss away a controller in frustration and swear off a game entirely?
Good games will often take these brick wall scenario's in mind. For example, in halo, after wandering around aimlessly for half an hour a way point will lead you in the right direction. Other games will ask if you want to reduced the difficulty after you died 10 - twenty times. Brick walls in games is just laziness on the part of the developers. There was a great article earlier this week on slashdot http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/24/ 1821238 that asked whether mathematical tuning made games better, in my opinion, Yes.
A complicated error is indistinguishable from a feature.
Yeah. Try using cheat codes to get past the Grim Reaper in the original Castlevania. There aren't any! The FAQs I've seen won't do it either.
I've been trying to beat that game for twenty years.
1) LoZ: WindWaker - Sailing around to pick up all those triforce pieces, it all just slowed down there and I never beat the game.
2) WarCraft III - I bought the game when it first came out, back when Demon Hunters could burn you for 300 mana, and Huntresses were the key to winning. Things changed, patches fixed imbalances, but I kept playing and had lots of fun becoming more skilled and enjoying myself. Then the first DC hack hit. What was frustrating wasn't so much that I went from a winning record to abject mediocrity so much as the complete inability to finish and sometimes even start games before I was inceremoniously DC'd. The number of times this happened after a dramatic turnaround was more than suspicious. I couldn't play it for months after that, and when I returned I felt left behind. There was no motivation to play competitively again.
3) Beyond Good and Evil - Sailing again, sort of. Once I got the power boat and could explore, I ended up getting very bored and stopped playing.
4) Goblin Commander - After getting through the campaign and defeating the fourth goblin, I simply lost interest.
5) Time Splitters 2 - Awesome game, beat the ever-living snot out of it. Then a friend accidentally corrupted my profile, simultaneously wiping out everything I'd done. Given the huge number of hours it took to unlock everything, that was utterly heartbreaking and I've never played the game again. This is the single greatest reason for an "unlock everything" code.
6) Final Fantasy X - I got stuck at the first, whatever that sport thigy was, match. Or shortly thereafter.
7) Azure Dreams - Fun game as all else, but I keep dropping off once I actually get in range of winning it. Excellent game despite my inability to finish it.
8) Wii Sports - I can't play this alone, not after playing it with people.
9) Evil Genius - For some reason, I can never bring myself to beat this game, despite my evil machinations and plans. I devise traps, complete objectives, silence my enemies, and then stop everything and never return. Apparently the reason why out Evil Genius Overlords haven't conquered the world yet is because they get bored with our childish strategems.
10) Crystalis - There's something about RPGs which dictates I get 3/4ths of the way through and lose interest. However awesome they are.
11) GTA3 - I have too much fun running from the FBI to further the plot. In fact, my only motivation to do any missions is so that I can get people even madder at me.
12) Advance Wars: Dual Strike - It's a fun game, but a long one. I got a fair ways through, but for whatever reason interest died in doing anythign but firing up a random battle map rather than going through the story.
13) Contact - I'm an idiot, and that's all. Best RPG since earthbound and I can't even play 2 hours before I broke for WoW. Shoot me now.
That's the best I can do while at work and away from my gaming collection.
Thunderclone: ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE! ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE!
My wife dearly wants to play video games. Unfortunately, they all seem to expect the player already has hundreds of hours of experience. Run-jump-twist-shoot-land type movements expected at the start of games are certainly a wall to someone who can barely make the character go thru an open door.
There's a small but potent market of games for adults who have practically no video game skills, but want a grown-up gaming experience.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
There was an old text adventure game for the Commodore VIC-20 where you come to this door in Dracula's castle. I typed in the command, SMASH DOOR WITH FIST (or something like that), and the response was, ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO DO THAT? Since the instruction booklet said that your commands must follow a certain pattern, I could never get past that part of the game and got died after the third day.
The command was YES, but the booklet didn't mention YES/NO situations. Plus being a dummy before the Dummies books came out didn't help and the VIC-20 gaming scene died when the Commodore 64 came out so there was no walk-through in a gaming magazine.
I completely disagree.
I don't cheat myself, but I have friends who do. Some of these friends wouldn't even play games if they couldn't cheat, simply because it wouldn't be fun for them. That's not how I have fun, but it's how they have fun.
They'll also slap a friendly sticky grenade on your back when you aren't looking and laugh.
Cheats have a place in video games, and I honestly miss the days of the "Unlock everything" codes for Gameshark or just the game itself because it provided a failsafe for when something goes wrong. Nothing kills a game like having your savegame corrupt, and having no recourse but to resign yourself to fewer characters, levels and features (especially after it took 60 hours of play to get everything you did).
Thunderclone: ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE! ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE!
Anyone remember the original Homeworld? There was this one damn mission where you basically had to move your whole fleet down this effing "tube" of asteroids in order to avoid "solar radiation" which would basically pwn your ships if you weren't perfectly in the goddamn "tube". First time I got to that mission it was a deal breaker; I'd wasted too many resources early in the game. So I went back and started over; got to that point with (literally) every ship I could possibly have, and it was still a huge pain in the ass. Theoretically you could waypoint your ass down the "tube" but in practice it was nearly impossible, and forget trying to do it by eyeball.
How about Sacrifice? I can think of more than a few missions in that game which made me chew on things.
How about the last mission in the Warcraft III expansion? Pain in my ass...And there was one in the original Starcraft...One of the last Protoss missions...Wasn't hard to beat the enemy, but beat them without them managing to kill one of your goddamn heroes? Good luck. I'd literally put them in a shuttle (can't let them roam around on their own...goes without saying), and put the shuttle on "hold" over a pile of photon cannons, and they'd send one damn capital ship in to specifically kill that fucking shuttle.
I think "walls" are a good thing, in some ways, because they challenge your ass to go to a new level...On the other hand, a poorly designed "wall", where the designers are basically just fucking with you, that's no fun. Why bother to play the damn game when they're basically just cheating to annoy you?
It's especially annoying in a "strategy" game (real-time strategy is generally far more about tactics than strategy, and most turn based strategy isn't mission based), because you're left in a situation where only a fricking moron would have attacked, and you've got to deal with it.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Because I hit that wall a while ago, where the games were static and similar and uninteresting. Another WWII shooter, yay. How many incredibly stupid AI opponents can keep you entertained? Just a handful, as that's all that will ever be on screen at the same time. Increase the difficulty, and you just get weaker, the computer doesn't get better. Halo 2 came out and was such a massive disappointment I stopped until these so-called next-gen games came out and AI is still stupid.
That leaves me with online play, and I can only run around the same little levels for so long playing tag with foul-mouthed, homo-phobic and racist 13 year-olds for so long. And don't get me started on the modders, which is fancy for little cheating ass bitches.
Yeah, I know, there are better games out there, and better ways to team up online, and I'm just being grumpy. I'm getting a little old, I guess, but why aren't any of these games drawing me in, keeping me awake all night and forgetting to eat anymore? I can't have changed that much over the past few console/pc generations.
And so I wait for the shooter where the goddamn bodies stay there, and might even stack up and block the doorway if I kill enough of them. Or the non-botched Sim City game. How about a sports game that doesn't require the same investment as a certification to be mediocre? I liked the first person view in Madden, nice gimmick. How about being able to be a lineman or tight-end, let another human, Live or local, or even computer do the passing? So few co-op games, even fewer good ones. I practically raised my boy doing co-op in Halo 1, waited in line for Halo 2, but now unless Bungie publicly apologizes, I might not even rent Halo 3.
(and more bitching, whining and moaning, c'mon, you old schoolers know what I'm talking about!)
It's the crazy game save locations and the ridiculous time constraints for each of the missions. Gears of War was a snap in comparison.
Those training missions, getting all of the ribbons? Trying to get a Y-Wing through those courses in what, 120 seconds, was impossible.
In Prince Of Persia: Warrior Within (PC) there was this bug at the end. You have to follow the Empress through the portal, and it gives you a video clip of her jumping through. It then switches to your view. When I tried to go through, nothing happened. I reloaded and tried again. When I still couldn't do it I went on the Ubisoft website and checked out the support forums. Turned out it's a random bug in the game and when it happens, it also corrupts all your saves so if you go back and reload, the bug is there too. The worst part is that this comes at the very end of the game, because after the portal is the final boss. In the end I had to download some dude's save game and play that, which sucked because he'd developed his character in different ways to mine so it wasn't really "my" Prince finishing the game.
I was so mad at Ubisoft for letting the game ship with such a bug present. I mean, the fact that it wasn't an isolated case or anything just makes it so much worse. Their official FAQ basically said "Try doing X, Y and Z [a ton of crap that did nothing], and if this doesn't work, restart your game from scratch". This is as extreme a "wall" in gaming as I can think of.
My worst - and most embarrassing - gamer "wall" was the chest puzzle early on in the game Sorcerer, an Infocom text adventure. About half an hour into the game, you find a chest in the basement of the first building with different-colored buttons on the side, each with a corresponding shape such as a crown on the purple button. Pushing the buttons only returns a message about it making a "click." Nowhere in the building was there any mention of a series of colors or shapes, or indeed any real mention of the chest at all.
After weeks, off and on, of frustration, my 14-year-old temper had had enough, and the box went on the shelf. Several times over the next few years, I came back to the game, and each time I was forced to rediscover why I'd put it down as I hit that goddamn chest.
So flash forward to my 18th year and, bored one afternoon, I'm going through my old games and I decide to finish that stupid puzzle once and for all. But again, I get stuck on that chest. Frustrated, I start to thumb through the manual accompanying the game, thinking maybe it's mentioned offhand there (a long shot, and one I'd tried before). It's not, but it's when I'm looking through another included little pamphlet in the box - the "Field Guide to the Creatures of Frobozz," a small color book of illustrations and descriptions of monsters in the gameworld - that the text at the end of one entry finally, FINALLY catches my eye. "Bloodworms are usually white and grey and black and red and black." "A common house rotgrub is gray and red and gray and purple and red." And it goes on, with this weird color description at the end of every entry.
Elsewhere in the small area of the game explorable before the chest, one part that had always bugged me was a note that discussed the current "password" and mentioned a monster type. It was different every playthrough, and was the only thing that was. So, firing up the game, I found the note, which mentioned "Bloodworms" this time, and proceeded quickly to the chest. Referring to my guide, I pushed "white, gray, black, red, black" on the buttons and BAM! It's opened. After four years of attempts, the bloody thing was OPEN. I actually started cheering and dancing around the room like a madman, exclaiming to my surprised parents down the hall that "the damn chest is OPEN!"
Those of you paying attention have probably already realized my ultimate shame. That's right, folks, I was defeated by the $%@#$%@#$% COPY PROTECTION for the game.
I've hated DRM ever since.
This is the hardest mission in the whole game. You have to fly in and destroy cargo containers near Harkov's Star Destroyer, tangle with some Tie Advanced (T/A) fighters, then move your ass to intercept a dozen waves of Z-95s spouting heavy rockets at your VERY VULNERABLE Interdictor. You have to keep the Interdictor intact, or you lose and the Star Destroyer escapes.
If you don't take out at least half the T/A force, they will overwhelm your pathetic wingmen and hunt you down and kill you later, right when you need to focus all your attention on those heavy rocket waves. Unfortunately, you only have about 5 minutes from mission start before the cruiser with the Z-95s appears, so you have to close and kill the T/As quickly. When you consider that you want to save a few missiles if you REALLY need to stop a heavy rocket beyond your range, it becomes even harder to tango with those T/As because you have to do most of the damage with lasers.
Man, that is incredibly tough**. I remember spending weeks flying it over and over.
** For those of you who bought the "Collector's CD" of Tie Fighter, you may think I'm crazy, because that mission is easy...and you would be right. For the CD release, the difficulty for that particular mission is toned down considerably (I think the number of Z-95 waves iscut to a quarter that of the original, so that you only haveto take out a couple and the Interdictor will survive). This challenge can only be found on the original floppy disk version of the game.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
I've hit a wall on pretty much every Final Fantasy game. It's more psychological than anything. I reach a point in the game, usually near the final boss when I don't feel like I'm at the appropriate skill level to progress any further. I then spend the rest of my time leveling up my characters until I lose interest in the game.
I seem to recall there was a freezing effect on the bosses when you used the holy water. It is awesome for Frankenstein and if you use it on the reaper (jump and hit the reaper with the water as it appears) then the sickles don't have time to appear.
Other cool games that are just as hard are Blaster Master and Zelda II.
Before you can climb to the top of a mountain on one of the earlier islands you need to topple two statues into pools of lava so you can skip across. So I drop the first one easy and then .... nothing ... the second one is 'just' out of range ... its been a month and I've since put the disc away. I'm since playing Call of Duty 2 and Pikmin2 more on my GameCube.
... we laughed and went back to SuperMario Strikers. What's the deal there? Are only previous Prince of Persia masters supposed to have bought that game?
The other GameCube one that kills me is Prince of Persia: Warrior Within - after a 4 mninute tutorial you are butchered by a Bitch-Queen
Kevin
Just last week I picked up Psychonauts in the bargain bin. I don't go for platformers as a rule, but I was enjoying the atmosphere and the humour of the game right up until the final level: The Meat Circus. It is hell. Getting through requires a long sequence of perfectly executed actions performed within a very tight time limit, all while you try to protect an NPC from taking too much damage. Fail, and you have to go back to the start of this sequence. After a few dozen tries I broke down and consulted a walkthrough. Nothing else in the game had been remotely this tough and I was sure I was doing something wrong. I wasn't. I was simply expected to put on a marathon display of perfection to get to the next checkpoint. Well, I'm not gonna play. Not fun. I went to YouTube instead and looked up a video of the closing cutscene.
Actually, in this case, it's not only the difficulty, it's the stupidity of some places, I loved jak 1 before the #@$%^&%^ bug that blocked the game.
I expected something great with jak2, some parts are, but some parts are just too stupid, My wife and myself are stuck in a damn STUPID place where you have to move cubes in due time to progress... I expected a platform game, I got a tetris.... without the fun. Added to which, if you die for some reasom you get back 20 minutes before....
It was the last game I bought from this company, as crash bandicoot seemd to go the same way lately...
I gave up on FFX because it took me 40 hours to reach the area where you can train chocobos (mentioned as a landmark; I don't recall where this was), and I was bored stiff: the story failed to grab me, most of the characters were jerks or were crushingly stupid (in fact: Auron was the only character I was able to sympathise with, and he's a raging asshole through most of the game that I played). So I stopped.
Granted, I've had difficulty with most of the recent FF games: 7 was fun enough; but 8 was depressing and, although I loved 9 right up to the end, I never did beat the last boss after he managed a one-hit-kill on his first attack: removed the disc from the PS2, have not bothered to put it back in yet. The thought of spending ten hours grinding my way to a level where I could actually beat the last boss simply turned me off.
I spent hundreds of hours building up all the characters in FF3/6 ages ago, when I was in high school and had not a thing better to do. I no longer care to do that sort of thing. There are better ways for me to spend my time. (That said: FFXII was awesome.)
Canthros
First, I think we need to elaborate on certain aspects of hitting the wall. You need separate hitting the wall on simply beating the game versus hitting the wall trying to "do it all." I think (from personal experience on seeing the ending credits on at least 1000 games, including many titles people are dicussing in this forum) that it is rare to find a game that _truly_ frustrates people simply to play the game. Deadly Towers for the NES (which is on my beaten list) was truly frustrating...falling into pits, small weapons, etc. Ghosts and Goblins too was a pain to beat...going through the game once is a pain, but to beat it you must do it twice...
Then there is the do it all: "bosses" in Final Fantasy X? please! none of the bosses necessary to beat the game are difficult, but the leveling up and other garbage to beat the optional bosses or dodging all the lighting bolts to get the weapons is sick mad at causing a crash. But...RPG's were not designed to be whiz-bang action all the time!
I think another thing IMHO is that games have gotten EASIER since the days of the earlier systems because we have more control over our on screen identities. First, almost all games now allow players to save partway through the game which allows the player to walk away, that was not an option on Battletoads. Games are also less linear now as well: if you are having a hard time with one thing in GTA you can go waste time venting on some poor soul in another part of the city and then come back to try again at what was hard...no so in Castlevania. Then there is "cheating devices" I hate them! never-owned-never-used! I am sure that many would be responders to this message will give examples of hard games today, and I am sure you are right, but in general games are easier today, plain and simple.
Newsflash: it's possible to beat FFX without using the sphere grid (read: leveling up) once.
I played FFX (friend's copy, I'd never buy another Square game). I am aware. Yet grinding levels is what is always suggested when things get hard.
Take your xenophobia and shove it.
Xenophobia? Yeah, because I just hate them Japs! I only own a PS2! I only have games such as Soul Calibur, Tekken, Suikoden (I-III; anything newer's a joke), and Resident Evil. I'm not saying that all Japanese RPGs are bad. I'm saying that drooling Americans will play anything, instead of spending their money on games that are worth it.
A professor of mine (and a Canadian liberal, surprisingly enough, to boot) said it best recently: "Americans, as a whole, are overly critical toward themselves--and look at everybody else in the world through rose-colored glasses."
Guess what, numbnuts? Just because it says Final Fantasy on the box doesn't mean it doesn't suck. (Examples: X-2, FFXI.) The horse of Final Fantasy is officially dead, despite Square's attempts to flog more and more out of it. But of course I'm xenophobic for thinking that Final Fantasy sucks. The idea that I have a bit more taste than to play RPGs that are the gaming equivalent of oatmeal is, of course, impossible.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
I didn't think Supply Lines was *too* bad, but what really annoyed the hell out of me was getting all the gold medals at the driving school in San Fiero. The one where you have to race to the other end of town and come back without damaging the car was totally maddening!
All golds at the flying school was super annoying the first time, but I just did it again a couple weeks ago and it wasn't nearly so frustrating the second time, and the attack helicopter is totally worth it!
The one I still haven't gotten anywhere close to doing well is the motorcycle stadium in Las Venturas. I hate Hate HATE that mission.
Good thing you don't actually have to DO any of these things to advance in the game, so it's not really hitting a wall, and mostly off-topic.
Exactly. But to win under those conditions in Fallout, you have to use your noodle. You have to think. Puzzle-solve. Do things other than randomly cack enemies. Even if you play a no-sphere game of FFX, you're still doing the exact same thing someone with eight billion levels is doing--you're just doing it with a slightly different set of conditions, whereas in Fallout it becomes a whole new game.
(It's also interesting to note that if you do go grinding in Fallout, it's considerably more entertaining than hitting X through menus in Final Fantasy.)
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
However, I'm playing it on "challenging" and spent most of an evening trying to take out a large group of mercenaries on a nearby island. (For anyone who has played the game, it's the bit in the "Research" level before you enter the mine.)
I had no bullets for my sniper rifle and anytime I started to approach them, via land or sea, I got cut to shreds.
In the end, I decided to swim some way around the back of the island and came across two guys in a gun boat - so I took them out, stole the boat and used it to totally strafe the mercenaries first, then picked off the remainder in the normal way.
I don't know if this was the recommended way of doing this but I would have been easy just picking them off with a sniper rifle had I had any ammunition. So it's nice to know that the game has been designed with at least two solutions in mind, if you are prepared to look a little for an alternative.
No game should rely on "pixel perfect jumping", which is my one and only criticism of the original Half-Life. I have literally given up some games because of having to try and retry unsuccessfully to get past a particular problem - there should always be the option of an alternative way through for players who "think outside of the box" a bit more.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Read my post again.
The insinuation is that too many developers are still bent on opposing the gameplayer, trying to keep the gameplayer from completing the game "too fast". The problem with this is that I'd like to decide for myself what is or is not "too fast".
Besides the point that not all players are of identical skills, "so "too fast" is a rather inaccurate metric no matter how you measure it; you may play through 4 hours of game in a day whereas the same section would cost me 12 hours spread over a few weeks.
So that end-level boss you'd beat in an hour or so, could frustrate me for hours. Does that make me a crappy player? Perhaps it does. It doesn't matter. It frustrates me and turns me off those types of games, whereas a cheat that would let me skip the boss would keep me hooked.
Games aren't challenges, they're entertainment.
Trying to dodge bullets in a war is certainly a challenge, but it's hardly entertaining. Watching a movie isn't a challenge at all, but it's most definitely entertainment. Which one would you choose?
Strip away the entertainment factor from a game and, no matter how challenging, you're left with something nobody wants to play.
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Funny, only now, after reading the article on wikipedia (that I linked above), I found out that the increased difficulty was due to a sloppy conversion of the refresh rate.