Slashdot Mirror
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?
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!
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!
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!
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.
It's hit or miss for me. Some games I probably give up on because they're getting pretty hard, and I'm not having that much fun anyways. Some games I have trouble with, but I'll play them until I figure it out, or until I get every item and find every secret room because I just enjoy the game. I'm a pretty casual gamer, I seldom have a whole afternoon to really dig into a game and get in the flow and perfect my technique to the level that some games seem to need.
A good example is the GTA games. I don't enjoy the missions nearly as much as I enjoy just cruising around and exploring the game world. Unfortunately, the missions are required to unlock various things, and I don't have the patience to do all of that. I might just want to spend a half hour blowing up helicopters with a rocket launcher. And so I turn to cheat codes, which GTA:SA fortunately has in spades.
While I respect that some people enjoy things that are difficult just for the sake of difficulty (some people like rock climbing for pete's sake), that's not how I prefer to spend my time, and a game that wants to force that sort of playing on me is not something that I'm interested in. Things like cheat codes can sometimes make a game like that enjoyable and appealing to a wider audience.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
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.