Great games that turn meh or frustrate..

RaMDOM

RaMDOM

RaMDOM

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I am increasingly becoming frustrated with some games nowadays that are a particular genre and then at some point through the game they introduce a section that is in complete contrast to the rest of the game and it either frustrates or just does not work and is effectively a barrier to you enjoying/completing the game. It seriously makes me wonder what game designers are up to. I would love to sit in one of their meetings when they discuss these bit. I always imagine the conversation going somewhere along the lines of; "okay, so now how do we really frustrate our audience now"? lol ;)

Anyway, recent examples of this that come to mind are:

Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood. I love this game - it is a great FPS section. However it is still sitting on my shelf unfinished because I simply cannot get past a particular quick draw section. I could probably do it if I sat here and just kept plugging away at it, but why should I when I am not enjoying it? However it is stopping me enjoying the rest of the game.

Mini Ninjas - To avoid spoilers for those who have not completed it: The slippery slidy bit near the end. A complete genre change, and not a good one. Completely unplayable and took me a good 15 to 20 attempts to get past. Why why why?

So anyone else got an example? And anyone care to venture as to why game designers do this and/or how these get beyond quality control?
 
My recent example is on the PS3 - Wolverine - there were two bits which just drove me mad - the whole section had nothing to do with skill, but was about how fast you could hit the buttons on your controller. I have plenty of coord, consider myself quite skilled at gaming in general, but I'm not designed to press buttons thirty times a second! I almost gave up on the game :D oh, and the final boss drove me mad as well - one-shot killing someone after three or four minutes of battle and then having to start again is mighty frustrating.

As for the PC, I find L4D frustrating, cos Sharpy is soooooooo crap. You get caught by a smoker and he's spinning on the spot like a dizzy window-licker screaming "where's mah cider?" across voice comms.
 
RaMDOM said:
Mini Ninjas - To avoid spoilers for those who have not completed it: The slippery slidy bit near the end. A complete genre change, and not a good one. Completely unplayable and took me a good 15 to 20 attempts to get past. Why why why?
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The bit when you're in your hat? I think it fits quite well. It's an adventure game and that's part of an adventure. Took me 2 tries and my wife 3. Maybe it's just something you're really bad at? (and I don't mean that in a mean way)
 
I think they want to give the gamers variety, and as much diversity as possible - however in attempting this, very rarely do they do it well enough to keep the pace of the rest of the game and often lose the plot in an effort to show how much thought they've put into the game. The results are very gimmicky, arcade-like mini-games that pull away from the rest of play, which is what the person playing it actually bought for.

I've also completed mini-ninjas and agree that was by far the worst, most uninspired, part of the game, with physics (or lack of) not good enough for the idea at hand. It felt like an afterthought and was a chore to play.

Off the top of my head I can't think of any others, but know I've played many, often on consoles, where it resorts to a button-mashing sequence, poor test of reaction, or some poorly implemented mini-game sequence.
 
Tripnologist said:
The bit when you're in your hat? I think it fits quite well. It's an adventure game and that's part of an adventure. Took me 2 tries and my wife 3. Maybe it's just something you're really bad at? (and I don't mean that in a mean way)
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Cheers bud :(

I don't know. It helped when I turned off the motion carp on the controller and used the sticks to steer.

It was just at some points you actually could not see where you were going. wtf? Not fun.

Got it done in the end and completed soon after.
 
GTA4. I love the city, the characters, the physics, the attention to detail, but get bored each time I try and get further into it.
 
The obligatory alien/monster section in first person shooters.

Xen in Half Life
The mothership in Crysis
The monkey monsters in Farcry
The submarine base in Uncharted (though i would argue that this was relatively well executed in comparison to the rest)
The tombs in return to castle wolfenstein
Hell in Doom 3

the list goes on. My problem with them is they completely ruin the pacing of the game, run and gun games like crysis suddenly became slow plodding, confusing mazes. I say Uncharted did it quite well as the actual pacing of the game remained the same, it's just the nature of the enemies changed, you were still constantly on the go.
 
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The sneaking part early on in RTCW: I never even bothered after that. I bought a shooter, not -ing Thief 4.1.


M
 
FEAR did to an extent, the factory/warehouse/office setting was used far too much in the middle of the game and made it turn a bit stale, saved only by the good action bits tearing up said locations, and of course the creepy bits. Fortunately it improves a lot nearer the end so it's worth going through.
 
The most recent for me was the boss fight at the end of chapter 5-2 in Resident Evil 5.

Tried 6 or 7 times to no avail. That might not sound a lot, but it's fairly easy to stay alive and those attempts each went on for a good while. The problem was that I went through every round of ammo and was basically left with the flame thrower (which just seemd to initiate the change in the creature so you make it apparently vulnerable).

Another stupid thing is that there was zero indication of how I was doing against it. Finally manage to kill the damn thing after loading up on a ridiculous amounts of flame ammo for the grenade launcher, and even then, I was down to my last lot of ammo on a gun when it finally died. I looked on the net afterwards at a couple of faqs, as I was convinced that I must have missed something obvious, only to find out that "it's a tough fight". Mental. There was no way I could kill it as part of playing straight through. It took replaying previous levels to upgrade my weapons, and spending a stupid amount on grenade ammo to eventually kill it.

I feel better for venting now :)

Sone said:
the race in Mafia before the patch, was damn hard
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I remember problems with that (as well as a few friends). It was weird as it was possible to take 1st place by the 2nd or 3rd corner, but I'd always end up crashing on about the 3rd lap. I noticed it was my concentration just drifting away by then, almost as if I was falling asleep at the wheel, so I ended up doing it by finishing the first 2 laps, going away and making a cup of tea, then coming back to finish the race. Worked 1st time doing it that way.
 
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Third mission in Homeworld 2 before it was patched. It was sodding impossible, never did bother going back to the game afterwards.
 
Sleepery said:
Third mission in Homeworld 2 before it was patched. It was sodding impossible, never did bother going back to the game afterwards.
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I managed to do that level pre-patch, it is actually one of my most proud gaming moments, certainly one of the hardest moments in gaming. Tbh it was indeed pretty much broken, there was so little margin for error.
 
I dunno man. I think random changes of pace/location/gameplay towards the very end of a game is kind of tradition. I quite like it.

An example of this done really well was halo 1, it had a super fast driving level at the very end. Was hard as nails difficulty with everything trying to kill you and a really difficult course. Fustrating as hell, but once done MASSIVE feeling of reward which made the ending much sweeter.

In my opinion the ending of fear 2 (basically same pace,gameplay entire way through. Was really boring as it didn't have one of these random 'things'. Really unmemorable.

Also I don't think you'd get on with platformers, try somthing like mario 64. There are parts you have to do literally 10 times MEGA fustrating. However once you finally beat them it feels great. Which is why we do it :)
 
Streeteh said:
The obligatory alien/monster section in first person shooters.

Xen in Half Life
Hell in Doom 3
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These two I disagree with. Doom is about hell spawns we all know that we have to goto hell! And half life is about aliens being thrown about into our 'dimension'. Both these games are the obligatory alien/monster section all the way through. I think you just have beef with those parts in the game. :p
 
LeJosh said:
These two I disagree with. Doom is about hell spawns we all know that we have to goto hell! And half life is about aliens being thrown about into our 'dimension'. Both these games are the obligatory alien/monster section all the way through. I think you just have beef with those parts in the game. :p
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Yea - that was the subject of the game, but I think is being said here is that these parts are particularly badly implemented. Thay are not enjoyable or in keeping with the game you have been playing.
 
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