The Gaming Den

Like everyone else, I got pissed at Bioshock Infinite. Some parts of the ending were internally inconsistent.

But I held off judgment and waited for the DLC to come out because in a fit of unreasoning trust I got the Season Pass.

I beat Burial At Sea Part 1 yesterday.

From a gameplay standpoint, it's pretty damn good. I also enjoyed the beginning, where you walk around Rapture and there's a humpback whale cruising around on the other side of the glass.

What bothered me was they took the isolated culture of Columbia--where the people would say, 'Well, I'd say he has too much of the Scroll and not enough of the Sword and the Key, if you take my meaning' and transplanted that sort of thing to Rapture.

Bioshock gave the impression that the ideology of the Great Chain and Andrew Ryan Is Right All The Time, was not universally bought into it. At least not so that people stood around discussing it at windows.

Now it makes a LITTLE sense, given the Fontaine takeover was recent so people would be talking about it. But it strikes me as a little too much out there and bought into.

I -did- like how you encounter several differently nationalities in Rapture. They also included some more weapons (a microwave gun that makes things explode if you hold it on them long enough), and I know for a fact I didn't find everything.

And fighting a Big Daddy is the hardest thing you'll do in the game.

I was expecting something from Kill la Kill, then i got that... shit.

I didn't expected that my account on some japanese browser game was deleted 2 hours after my subscription.

And i tought that L5R would give me some nice japanese experience, but... BUT!

I wish Black/White didn't exist, and that the Dreamcast did better, because then I'd've been able to play the third Ecco the Dolphin game. I also wish Fallout:NV was more like FO3.

I wish the new XCOM didn't have the glaring game play issues it has.

And I wish the new expansion to the new XCOM actually fixed those issues instead of pretty much anything good about it being largely destroyed by the same issues that screw the base game.

For the particulars...

The tactical game is messed up by poor replayability due to a complete lack of randomized map generation. The incredibly stupid thing with aliens being lame ass trap cards with no off screen behavior at all until "triggered". And a continued dominance of certain specific strategies/abilities to deal with that bullshit.

But the game really fucking fails on a Strategic level. The strategic game play is shallow, broken and made out of nothing but harmfully painful attempts to obfuscate the fact that it is shallow and broken. Putting the fucking missions on a fucking poorly fluff excused timer for bonus points DIDN'T HELP ANYONE.

You STILL spend all your early game rushing fucking satellite coverage to the expense of ALL else. The campaign is still scripted on rails and you still manipulate it by NOT meeting your "urgent" world saving mission objectives until you are fucking ready. All the new content basically just adds to the great mess of original content that "hits" only AFTER you have peaked the fucking "rush satellites!" tipping point. And then BAM all the content. Then... lame ass still short as fuck late game.

edit: Oh yeah and fucking Teleporting aliens STILL A THING. Sound freeze up crash during alien turn STILL A THING. Lost saves STILL A THING. Inability to pick what fucking kind of recruit you hire STILL A THING. Pick 1 of 3 missions and have every other fucking country pull out because you ONLY OWN ONE TROOP CARRYING PLANE, STILL A THING.

I wish Fable 3 was better, specifically the following things:

-I wish they gave you more control over how your weapons grew

-I wish they had given the game to the goofy british humor guys OR the crawler nightmare guys. Either one would have improved the game if the tone wasn't jumping all over the damn place

-I wish there was a way to automatically repair your rental properties without going to each house individually (Molyneux said it was designed to be a pain in the ass on purpose)

-I wish the in-game map was better

-I wish the game was more difficult. I'm not a hardcore gamer and don't mind easy games, but I should feel like I can lose if I don't do good enough

-The part where you lower the tax on booze and everyone is puking in the streets? That can stay. In my castle, my cook was making soup and literally puking in it. classy!

-I know that this was made before Skyrim, but if you're going to give the option to marry NPCs, being able to marry more NPCs that I would actually give a flying shit about is better than random NPCs on the street that fall in love because I farted in front of them. Also, marriage is a pain with no obvious benefit.

Shrapnel wrote:I wish Black/White didn't exist, and that the Dreamcast did better

I wish Black/White really went into some kind of crazy land plot based on an exaggeration of American history or politics. It could be a literal invasion plot (settlement), a war against evil overlords (battle for independence), a huge row over the government forcing every town to have a Poke Centre that doesn't charge money and banning "Assault Pokemon" and other crazy shit.

And I wish the Sega Saturn had been ultra popular. Because I really want to have played Guardian Heroes.

I wish more games were made for PC, instead of consoles. Or at least ported.

I wish X Rebirth wasn't a steaming pile of shit.

I wish Ubisoft would finally let the Assassin's Creed die, instead of kicking its corpse for money. AC4 Black Flag reminds me very much of Corsairs game, except the land engine is better and sea and economic engines are much worse. The fucking boat handles like a car.

I wish Square would stop making fucking Final Fantasies.

Longes wrote:I wish X Rebirth wasn't a steaming pile of shit.

Tell me of this.

PhoneLobster wrote:I wish the new XCOM didn't have the glaring game play issues it has.

Hell, sometimes I think I'd settle for conversations about XCOM being better, since many people are quick to brand you an ungrateful hate-beast for having complaints even if you largely enjoy the game. Such attitudes puzzle me given that every god damned thing PL posted about the game is totally and demonstrably true.

Also, I'd pitch in cash money right now if it'd guarantee that future releases have some kind of field-of-view/line-of-sight overlay toggle which let you know exactly what areas the selected squaddie may cover while laying down reaction fire. As it currently stands properly placing your squad sight sniper on a rooftop is more of a deeply stupid art than a science.

Kaelik wrote:

Longes wrote:I wish X Rebirth wasn't a steaming pile of shit.

Tell me of this.

Well, it's a space sim, but you only have one ship and can't change it, the ship is two rooms big, the stations are all pretty generic, and it's just overall not as good as X3.

I wish my eyes didn't start bleeding every time I tried to replay one of the old Fallout games.

Kaelik wrote:

Longes wrote:I wish X Rebirth wasn't a steaming pile of shit.

Tell me of this.

X3TC was an overwhelming and tedious game with poor presentation that gave you the opportunity to do a lot of cool things. It needed a better UI, better automation, better methods for scaling up complexes, and just a lot of little tools here and there to make your life easier and let you graduate to actually running a multi-ship, multi-complex corporation. X Rebirth does none of those things, and makes many of them worse (SETA, where are youuu). But the one thing X Rebirth does do is "fix" all of the fun you can have. You will pilot the same ship with basically the same specs the entire game, gradually swapping out your DEATHLASER for DEATHLASER MK II which will become DEATHLASER MK III and so on and you will never make any meaningful choices whatsoever about the thing you are expected to fly the entire damn game.

X3TC+Albion is 20 bucks, and in every way the superior product. With a modding community to boot. Though, even X3TC is a game that is fun "for what it could have been," and 90% of what you do will be tedious bullshit that should have been what X Rebirth fixed and very clearly did not.

It's cool that the Guild Wars 2 team can produce new content every two weeks, but it baffles me that they're unwilling to actually leave any of it in the game for longer than two weeks. Their game would be growing at a phenomenal pace if they weren't constantly ripping out the new content.

I wish games, especially action games, stopped lowering their impact by adding item collection, uneventful exploration or bland and uninteresting side quests just to artificially raise the play time.
I'd rather have an intense 5 hours game than a 50 hours game where only 2 hours will really stand out, the rest being "travel from point A to point B" or "hunt for that item".

I wish more games had good modding tools

I wish that Capcom didn't hate money.

Blade wrote:I wish games, especially action games, stopped lowering their impact by adding item collection, uneventful exploration or bland and uninteresting side quests just to artificially raise the play time.
I'd rather have an intense 5 hours game than a 50 hours game where only 2 hours will really stand out, the rest being "travel from point A to point B" or "hunt for that item".

I wish more games had good modding tools

I was thinking something similar the other day, specifically in regards to Borderlands 2. It's a great game, and I do enjoy looting, but I feel like enemies dropping trash items you don't even care to look at and the occasional minor upgrade is just time consuming. I think the game would be better served by granting less frequent more major upgrades to weapons, each of which functioned significantly different (or at least functioned similarly but were significantly better).

Similarly, I don't think the 'complex' and 'deep' leveling in Demons/Dark Souls particularly adds anything. I'd much rather have less stats that were each more meaningful, and have weapons that instead of going from +1 to +10 (or have some enchantment and going +1 to +5) were just straight up the weapon with some form of enchantment. I don't think you'd lose any of the actual meaningful gameplay complexity there, combat would be just as varied. All the other stuff is just obfuscation.

Sigil wrote:I was thinking something similar the other day, specifically in regards to Borderlands 2. It's a great game, and I do enjoy looting, but I feel like enemies dropping trash items you don't even care to look at and the occasional minor upgrade is just time consuming. I think the game would be better served by granting less frequent more major upgrades to weapons, each of which functioned significantly different (or at least functioned similarly but were significantly better).

You are not getting it. Borderlands is a Hellgate: London Diablo clone. Trash items are a requisite detail.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:I wish that Capcom didn't hate money.

This.

I also wish Nintendo would stop giving Japan all the good event Pokémon. Fucking bastards.

Longes wrote:You are not getting it. Borderlands is a Hellgate: London Diablo clone. Trash items are a requisite detail.

No, I get it. And I can appreciate it for what it is, but functionally it would be no different if every gray-white-green item I ran over was immediately liquidated into cash. This is "Shit you wish was better" not "Shit you already appreciate as is." I actually think Diablo and its ilk would be better served by this same change. The combat-loop of switching around between 4 different guns, each very different from each other, is already satisfying. Trash loot adds nothing to this, good loot does.

i wish shadowrun returns was more like fallout 2 or fallout tactics: brotherhood of steel

I wish CCP would actually work on fixing the key problems of 0.0 and alliance dynamics instead of fucking around with pointless balancing.

I wish Heroes VI wasn't such a crime against humanity. Heroes of Might and Magic used to be my favorite series, but Ubisoft has shat on it so hard that I probably won't even buy Heroes VII, assuming it ever even comes out.

-Username17

I never really liked Heroes, but i hope thast Might and Magic (10?) Legacy will be somewhat good . .

FrankTrollman wrote:I wish Heroes VI wasn't such a crime against humanity. Heroes of Might and Magic used to be my favorite series, but Ubisoft has shat on it so hard that I probably won't even buy Heroes VII, assuming it ever even comes out.

So very this. They could rerelease HoMaM 2 or 3 completely unchanged except "designed for your modern OS and you can buy it on Steam or whatever" and I'd grab it. I loved 2 so much back in the day.

Longes wrote:You are not getting it. Borderlands is a Hellgate: London Diablo clone. Trash items are a requisite detail.

Speaking of Hellgate London, I wish it hadn't been so buggy on release that the company went bankrupt.

Koumei wrote:So very this. They could rerelease HoMaM 2 or 3 completely unchanged except "designed for your modern OS and you can buy it on Steam or whatever" and I'd grab it. I loved 2 so much back in the day.

I still have the cheat sheet with all the monster stats for Heroes 2, but I haven't played it in over a decade. I played a fair bit of Heroes 3, but I was never good enough to move past Normal difficulty even on the easiest maps.

Speaking of re-releases, many of the people that made the unofficial expansion In The Wake of the Gods have teamed up to create their own Heroes 3 clone with modding support built in from the start. The project homepage is here. They aren't finished, but from what I understand the game is almost playable. You do need a working installation of Heroes 3 for it to steal sprites from though.