Gripe about What You're Playing 2: Bellyache-tric Boogaloo

[Violentvixen]

Also you don't get to see Elizabeth's wacky antics, just seeing them as text is criminal

 

[Kazin]

I always thought Persona 3 Portable was for those who've played FES a dozen times, to give them some more content with FeMC and make it much, much faster to play through, since walking around gets boring when you've played the game that much. That it's now the de facto version of Persona 3 is weird.

I'm at 9/3 at the moment as FeMC, been keeping my Tartarus runs to the absolute minimum to do as much social link stuff as I can. I'm going to try to finish all Elizabeth's quests, as well, as I haven't done that before... Only being able to take 3 at a time sucks, especially because the enemies won't drop quest items unless you have the appropriate quest active. Stupid Hand enemies!

 

[Alex]

The posts about Metroid Dread make me remember what it was like to play the last Batman game, Arkham Knight. Everything I read was all "the batmobile isn't that bad" so I gave it a try and got to a mandatory time trial racetrack level that I had to complete. And that was as far as I got in that game.

Just made me feel crazy because other people apparently don't get permanently stuck on that? I played the same game they did??

 

[lincolnic]

The posts about Metroid Dread make me remember what it was like to play the last Batman game, Arkham Knight. Everything I read was all "the batmobile isn't that bad" so I gave it a try and got to a mandatory time trial racetrack level that I had to complete. And that was as far as I got in that game.

Just made me feel crazy because other people apparently don't get permanently stuck on that? I played the same game they did??

That's about as much of Arkham Knight as I played, too. Though the bigger problem I had was that the game just overwhelms you with abilities and gadgets and combat stuff and stealth all at once, and even having played and enjoyed all the other Arkham games, I just couldn't keep any of it straight when it was all available from the start. Too many situational controls! Not enough time to get familiar with one system before being shuttled on to the next one.

 

[Purple]

I hate the UI of Chess.com so much.

A friend's been trying to learn and I'm supportive so we've been playing a quick little game or two a day... or trying to, but it's weirdly hard to just start a game against a friend because the UI is this broken mess of invite links and live connections and time outs and big giant play buttons that secretly just make you play some rando.

And then also, I just learned, in the middle of a really interesting match, the UI supports both dragging pieces around, or clicking on a piece then its destination. So if you happen to say, click on your king, who you're about to move, then think better of it, go back and study the board, then touch your rook with the intention of doing a thing "OH YOU'RE CASTLING!" and no. No I most certainly was not, chess.com.

 

[YangusKhan]

I tried out the Forspoken demo today because I've been vaguely interested to see what the FFXV team can do without being tied to that game's production history. But man, I wish I could like it and I just don't think I can.

We've already seen this game before. It doesn't matter that she's a New Yorker isekai'd into magic parkour fantasy land, it's still a AAA open world game with a bunch of busywork objectives and a barebones crafting system and skill trees and fucking pipe dream minigames. I don't want to feel this cynical, but good lord do AAA open world games need to figure out how to stop being the exact same game.

 

[ArugulaZ]

Reviews across the board have... not been encouraging. Just knowing that it uses the Final Fantasy XV engine is probably enough for me to ignore it.

 

[WisteriaHysteria]

FFXV engine worked fine on PS5. Game looked gorgeous. Gameplay was kind of neat but also whatever. The thing that made FFXV magical to me was the setting, the story, and the characters. What I've seen of the setting, story, and characters of Forespoken has been incredibly bland and uninteresting at best. Following the Brat Pack around the world of Eos was awesome b/c they were all likable characters and their banter between each other was fun. The banter between Forespoken's main character and her bracelet in the beginning of the game is kinda painful. They hate each other and just bicker and insult each other constantly. And there's only the two of them, so there's no variety. The slices of Forespoken I've seen, the world is generic and empty and nothing interesting going on. I'd like to give the game a real go, and I trust the story is complicated enough that the two protagonists grow and evolve, but the opening of the game lacks any meaningful hooks, and I just don't have the time or the money right now to waste on something mid when I've got a gigantic backlog of games I'm far more interested in playing.

 

[Patrick]

I just caught up on the last few weeks of this thread, and I had no idea that the new Xbox was named the Series. If I wanted to buy an Xbox I would have read up on it and figured it out, but they have done a bad job of promoting the actual name of their system. Maybe they should have picked different letters than the last gen boxes, or called them Slim and Extra, or literally anything else.

 

[Violentvixen]

FFXV engine worked fine on PS5. Game looked gorgeous. Gameplay was kind of neat but also whatever. The thing that made FFXV magical to me was the setting, the story, and the characters. What I've seen of the setting, story, and characters of Forespoken has been incredibly bland and uninteresting at best. Following the Brat Pack around the world of Eos was awesome b/c they were all likable characters and their banter between each other was fun. The banter between Forespoken's main character and her bracelet in the beginning of the game is kinda painful. They hate each other and just bicker and insult each other constantly. And there's only the two of them, so there's no variety. The slices of Forespoken I've seen, the world is generic and empty and nothing interesting going on. I'd like to give the game a real go, and I trust the story is complicated enough that the two protagonists grow and evolve, but the opening of the game lacks any meaningful hooks, and I just don't have the time or the money right now to waste on something mid when I've got a gigantic backlog of games I'm far more interested in playing.

So that bracelet will never develop a new recipe? LAME. Ignis is the best.

Maybe they should have picked different letters than the last gen boxes, or called them Slim and Extra, or literally anything else.

Xbox menthol

 

[Kazin]

I'm going to try to finish all Elizabeth's quests, as well, as I haven't done that before...

Lmao I really should look up what all the quests are before I put a ton of time into doing them. I'm not grinding all those levels and personae to try to beat Elizabeth with those ridiculous requirements lol. Dammit

 

[ArugulaZ]

Geez, Goldeneye doesn't show much mercy to noobs, does it? I'm already stuck at the second stage, because I don't know how to make it through without summoning a ton of guards every fifteen steps. Everything's so samey looking that it's also way too easy to get lost and stuck in a loop.

 

[Purple]

So... decades of other games may have trained you to think, like, "if I don't get a headshot and immediately kill this person I'll be spotted and cause trouble" but with Goldeneye nobody can sound alarms or call for help until they finish their big long "hey you shot my arm/leg!" animation. So counterintuitively, a good way to avoid detection is to just blind-fire from the hip as you turn corners and pick people off while they're wincing, rather than truly stealth it.

 

[4-So]

Could just be the difficulty setting I'm playing on but God of War: Ragnarok should just regen all of Kratos's health after any encounter, instead of letting me start an encounter with 1/4 of my health, dying, and restarting from the latest checkpoint with all of my health. Just give me full health after every encounter and stop wasting my time.

 

[FelixSH]

I started playing Q.U.B.E., which is generally a nice Portal-like, but already introduced timing based puzzles. The second one wasn't really about figuring anything out, that was easy. But doing it with the correct timing was pretty hard. This might be me, I'm just bad at First Person games, and having to time something, especially if I have to hit a small target, is very frustrating and hard to me.

Assuming I'm seemingly done with the first third, I assume this just gets harder? I'm not necessarily complaining about the game (I guess most people don't find this as hard as I do), just want to know if puzzles will keep on having timing components. If so, I will stop now, instead of getting more and more frustrated.

 

[Becksworth]

Could just be the difficulty setting I'm playing on but God of War: Ragnarok should just regen all of Kratos's health after any encounter, instead of letting me start an encounter with 1/4 of my health, dying, and restarting from the latest checkpoint with all of my health. Just give me full health after every encounter and stop wasting my time.

I'm noticing that in the prequel. Outside of a couple of instances mid fight, the health power ups have that vestigial feeling that lives were getting in the Mario games right up before Odyssey.

 

[ArugulaZ]

I was playing Sega Genesis Classics on my Xbox Series S to relieve my boredom, only to have Golden Axe III increase it. In every imaginable way, this strikes me as a game that nobody wanted to make, and which desperately does not want to exist. This wasn't released in the United States back when the Genesis was actively supported, right? Seems pretty obvious why.

Anyway, here's my review.

And you bored

Recently, I purchased the Xbox One version of Sega Genesis Classics. Heaven only knows why, as I've bought Sega Genesis collections at least half a dozen times before, but it turned out to be a smarter purchase than I realized. It gives me a convenient way to play all my Genesis favorites (and...

cohost.org

 

[ASandoval]

Tried out Sonic Advance for the first time and it has what's got to be the worst Robotnik boss fight in one of these games.

The stage is filled with water with the exception of the top line of the screen. Robotnik, whose egg ship is bigger than the small gap of air the Sonic has, stays at the top and shakes the screen occassionally to drop icicles on you. You have to jump on the top of the icicle to be able to jump up to either a.) hit Robotnik or b.) try to get outside of the water for air. Unless I'm missing something, there is no other way to get air, no available bubbles or anything, and the screen is longer than one screen wide.

All of this means you have to deal with Sonic water physics the entire fight, you have to choose whether to hit Robotnik, which is relatively easy to do, or try to reach the top of the screen to get air which is basically impossible because you run and move through air very slowly and basically have to pixel perfect get to the top of the icicle at its highest point to have any hope to jump again and reach the top of the screen to get air. The fight gets slightly easier the longer it goes because as Robotnik takes more damage he drops more icicles, but early on and for most of the fight, he'll only drop two, and if you have to run to the other side of the screen to reach an icicle, you're not going to have time to be able to get air.

I didn't die the entire game and had 7 lives by the time I reached this fight, and it took all but my last life to pull this off and move on with my life.

 

[Issun]

I got a few hours into Doom Eternal and just could not go on. It's not a bad game, but the visceral simplicity of the 2016 reboot was needlessly complicated into something I barely recognized.

 

[Bongo]

That's consistent with my experience of it. The arcadier arenas and the cartoonier colors are a step forward, but you've just got a few buttons too many, and it's tuned so that you have to use all of them.

 

[Peklo]

Octopath Traveler II has a demo out. It's been nearly five years since the first game and everything it was the sequel seems to maintain nearly unchanged: I picked a character and played through their prologue, with the experience mirroring the earlier game almost exactly. Brief rant about the writing involved.

Spoiler

picked the Sexy Thief, whose story is like classic octopath writing for women: opens up with her on the job with some other dudes, one of whom asks her to give him a handjob--she tells him to go jack off himself because that's strong female characters. she's grown up a literally collared slave, beaten and whipped by thief cult ppl called "father" and "mother." the prologue dungeon involves infiltrating a mansion which you do by stealing a sex worker's attire and masquerading as them; she is propositioned by npcs wanting to fuck her. it's a set-up and you fight a vaguely sympathetic peer to the death while the writing does crap like "we can't ever break free... of these chains that bind us" while talking about the characters' literal shackles. the protag then resolves to kill her parents herself to get the keys each holds to rid herself of her collar and earn her freedom. that's the whole character

The major key creatives all seem to have stayed on for the sequel, including writer Kakunoshin Futsuzawa who's written all Octopath-branded things like the ongoing mobile game. If anything, including the above, bothered one about the first game, I see no indication in the material provided by the demo that the creative direction has shifted even a little since.

 

[ArugulaZ]

Holy shit Double Dragon II (arcade) is chock full of slowdown. I'm running it on a tiny arcade cabinet which isn't the most powerful thing in the universe, but it's pretty clear that the slowdown is coming from the original hardware. The music plays fine, but whenever a big enemy approaches or multiple enemies are onscreen at once, say goodbye to fast, smooth gameplay!

 

[R.R. Bigman]

I got a few hours into Doom Eternal and just could not go on. It's not a bad game, but the visceral simplicity of the 2016 reboot was needlessly complicated into something I barely recognized.

I’m having a very similar experience with Devil May Cry 3. The complexity of the combat systems is one thing, but the punitive difficulty makes practicing and refining your skills with even one of the multiple fighting styles rather demoralizing. The first game had essentially two melee weapons types, with a handful of moves for each. The second game didn’t have a melee combat system!

 

[smacketh]

I’m having a very similar experience with Devil May Cry 3. The complexity of the combat systems is one thing, but the punitive difficulty makes practicing and refining your skills with even one of the multiple fighting styles rather demoralizing. The first game had essentially two melee weapons types, with a handful of moves for each. The second game didn’t have a melee combat system!

The original version? Yeah, I remember that one is hard. The Special Edition has an easier mode if that is an option. It's pretty fun when it's not overwhelmingly difficult like the initial version.

 

[Tato]

Playing Wonder Boy III : Monster Lair for the first time thanks to the anniversary collection. I can see what the developers were going for, but the weird Frankenstein hybrid of platformer and shooter doesn't really work for me, it just makes both modes feel very basic. It's certainly an interesting idea and evolution of the original Wonder Boy gameplay, but just doesn't feel special in any way. I will say that the game picked up considerably starting in Round 8, with really cool callbacks to previous games and lots of inventive bosses. But the first 7 rounds were a slog.

 

[ArugulaZ]

You think maybe this game was offered as an olive branch to players who complained that the series was getting too RPG-y? It took a long, long time before its cousin Adventure Island advanced beyond its simple platforming roots.

 

[Kazin]

Metroid Dread sure thinks its combat should be the focus of the game, jeez

 

[lincolnic]

Not a huge gripe, because the game was still fun, but 20XX isn't nearly as replayable as I thought it was gonna be. I was expecting more variation, on the whole.

 

[Kazin]

Whoever decided to put QTEs in a Metroid game is an asshole.

Anyway, beat Metroid Dread.

 

[Becksworth]

Related Metroid griping: no amount of remastering/gussying up will make the Phazon Mines in Prime a memorable area.