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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?
the cheats in games. They have made gamers weak.
You mad
Note to Nintendo: if you sell a game, make sure that there is some sort of code to use to unlock all the game has to offer, or a reduced difficulty level, I paid for the whole game and to be locked out of 1/5th of the tracks (likely among the best ones) and 4/5ths of the story mode does not feel right.
-- the cake is a lie
If you havn't played the little racer levels, then you don't know what hitting a gaming wall is. All this talk about FF games and Gears of War and Doom 3 and stuff?
Please. Fire up your NES Emulator of choice and see how far you get with Battletoads (without cheating of course..)
Warning: You may want to go shopping for a hairpiece first, because you'll look funny once you pull all your hair out.
Its Deluxe, son. Deluxe!
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.
I have been trying to overthrow the leader of an enemy corporation,
so I've been camped outside his house with a can of mace and a box
of Chips-Ahoy for 3 days now, but I think he went skiing.
God this game is frustrating.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
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?
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!)
Grim Reaper? That's nothing. Here's how you do it:
1. You need the cross (boomerang). Lucky for you, it is available on the way to the reaper, even if you die and restart.
2. You need to build up hearts, at least 40-50 of them. On the top of the staircase that leads to the hall full of axe knights, there is a large heart in the candle directly above the stairs. Grab the (5) hearts, go down the stairs and come back up and repeat.
3. You need triple-shot crosses. You can get this by killing the axe knights with crosses, then afterwards hitting candles with the cross. The candle should drop double, and later triple shots. IF you fail to get the triple shots, go back down the stairs and come back up to face the axe knights again.
Strategy for killing the reaper:
1. Saturate the space. Fire crosses even if they're going to miss the reaper. The primary purpose of the crosses is to kill the reaper, but the secondary purpose is to kill the flying sickles. Try to fire crosses at multiple levels of the screen so you get more coverage. This works well with the next technique, which is:
2. Always keep moving. You can't see the sickles appear under you if you stand still - you have a chance of dodging them if you see them fade in. Jumping from level-to-level makes this strategy easier to pull off, and also allows you to saturate the whole screen with crosses (see above).
I did spend quite a bit of time learning how to beat the reaper hen I was a kid, but compared to the count he's cake. Still, until I came up with this strategy he usually kicked my ass, so I'm not surprised you're stuck on him.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Heh, I'm (in reality) very similar when faced with a losing situation online. I like to make a defeat as fun as possible, I was into Counter-Strike for a while and I've been in some pretty 1-sided situations. I remember once where I was on the terrorist team in the office level. We were completly random strangers and the CT team was a tourney clan. Whooping us bad, to say the least. So I made it fun next round, I stabbed the hostages just enough to keep them alive, tagged the wall with a spray, and stood there in between the hostages. They always came to the hostages last, and there I was. They had one guy left, we had one guy left. They're guy the shot gun, I didn't have the money to pay for armor. He came up, saw me standing there and ducked back. Then ran at me, and killed me like I was afk. I hit the ground and so did the grenade I had been holding the entire round. BLAM! There went the hostages and there went the knifing CT! The whole server had a good laugh and called it a draw!
Demented But Determined.
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.
As opposed to difficulty. For difficulty based stuff, I can accept some games are just plain hard. The ones that bother me is the ones that don't give you any way out of it, and kick you while you're down. For example, in the Megaman Zero series you used to miss the EX Skills if you suck (need an A rating to obtain them), so if you suck you don't get the moves that makes the game easier and you're basically stuck. Gradius V for PS2 is like that too. You unlock unlimited credits after 15 hours of gameplay, but that's only while playing the game, so if you die 15 minutes into the game at the third stage, it gets boring pretty quickly to try to fill your quota of 60 game overs before you can even have a shot at beating the game. It's one thing that you can suck at a game and have a hard time. It's another that things get progressively worse the more you suck. In Gradius V if you could half an hour before dying, at least you won't be as frustrated with repeatedly dying compared to lasting only 15 minutes so you'll hit your unlimited credits easier.
A counter example of a good difficulty wall would be Shining Force Neo. In the 3 Trials of Light the Demons bosses all do some insane amount of damage compared to anything you may have fought before (heck even some of the random stuff before them is insanely hard), but you can save basically anywhere. The game has a ton of customization so if one combo doesn't work you can always try another. And if you still can't beat it you can do the tried and true level up approach.
Best weapons for bosses (obviously get at least double-shot for best effect):
Giant Bat - holy water. Hide under the block on the right side of the screen, then throw the holy water on the block when the bat flies at you. Once he is caught, you can burn him to death.
Medusa - holy water. Even kills the annoying snakes on the floor.
Mummy Men - cross. Slip into the far left as the men appear and fire your crosses. Not only do they take out all the stuff the men throw at you, they do quadruple damage because each cross hits both men twice.
Frankenstein - holy water. Throw it directly on Frankenstein, and ignore Igor. You can kill him quickly with that. Try not to die, because you can't get the holy water where you restart.
Grim Reaper - cross. I've discussed this above.
Dracula - I know a lot of people like the holy water route, but I like the cross (triple-shot, of course). You can use it to ward off fireballs in his first form (got to get the timing right so you throw the cross right before you jump up and whip him in the head).
For the second form, just smother the screen at dracula's head level with crosses. Keep jumping up and firing a cross towards the other side of the screen. Every time he comes down from a jump he will get whacked multiple times. You have to hope and pray that he will high jump when he gets to you, but it usually happens enough times for you to win.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
... he's just too fast.