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[Peanut]

I think I'm done with RE. On two separate occasions, on the way to a typewriter, I've been waylaid by two hunters in a hallway and killed, losing progress through almost the entire residence/aqua ring area, past the fight with Plant 42, which I repeated, and then again through a lot of the post residence stuff in the mansion.

If there's one thing that can make me quit a game almost immediately, it's unexpected and cheap game over's leading to a ton of replaying. It happened to me most recently in both Lost Odyssey and Tales of Vesperia, two games I've avoided since.

Save points are the biggest piece of sh*t design still around in games. Die, please!

[rav4ge]

Originally Posted by Peanut

I think I'm done with RE. On two separate occasions, on the way to a typewriter, I've been waylaid by two hunters in a hallway and killed, losing progress through almost the entire residence/aqua ring area, past the fight with Plant 42, which I repeated, and then again through a lot of the post residence stuff in the mansion.

If there's one thing that can make me quit a game almost immediately, it's unexpected and cheap game over's leading to a ton of replaying. It happened to me most recently in both Lost Odyssey and Tales of Vesperia, two games I've avoided since.

Save points are the biggest piece of sh*t design still around in games. Die, please!

No kidding. Remember passcodes? I literally had a notepad FULL of 24-digit codes for all the games I played. The sad thing is, developers continued to use this method until like 2005 or so, then it just pretty much stopped altogether.

[raphael_is_cool]

Originally Posted by Peanut

If there's one thing that can make me quit a game almost immediately, it's unexpected and cheap game over's leading to a ton of replaying. It happened to me most recently in both Lost Odyssey and Tales of Vesperia, two games I've avoided since.

Save points are the biggest piece of sh*t design still around in games. Die, please!

Agreed. Especially when you want to go do something else but you can't since you can't bloody save. Although with regards to dying and losing progress in Lost Odyssey I realised it created auto-save checkpoints in critical places and I've never had a problem since it is generally just the boss fights that are tough. I've not finished the game because, while there are some great characters (and moments) and the short stories are really good, I got bored with the main story.

[Peanut]

Originally Posted by raphael_is_cool

Agreed. Especially when you want to go do something else but you can't since you can't bloody save. Although with regards to dying and losing progress in Lost Odyssey I realised it created auto-save checkpoints in critical places and I've never had a problem since it is generally just the boss fights that are tough. I've not finished the game because, while there are some great characters (and moments) and the short stories are really good, I got bored with the main story.

That's always the biggest problem. Wanting to leave, but being unable to. And yeah, Lost Odyssey does have that nifty auto-save, and most RPG's aren't too bad in that respect, but when you're thrown into something out of nowhere, without the ability to save, is when it really sucks.

Take Tales of Vesperia, for example. I had fought a boss and done a bunch of side stuff. On the way to the next town, I decide to do like an hour of grinding. All good. I head into town, your group splits up for a bit, I walk down a f*cking street and get attacked by 3 guys out of nowhere. Having just been out grinding, my health was very low for this particular character. Two seconds into the fight, I'm dead. Upwards of 2 hours of progress lost, and there wasn't a save point in sight. Not even in the town. Bullsh*t.

[raphael_is_cool]

Ouch. I remember on FFXII I did this bit with the confusing different levels of a dungeon all with gates named after star signs and numbered and they had timed switches on other levels and stuff (****ing confusing). I had not warped out after the plot relevant boss battle and was walking back but got lost (everything looked the same!). Little did I know that this was also where loads of high level enemies were and possibly the game's hardest secret boss (the strongest summon creature you can capture, I think). So there I was walking around for two hours longer than I intended to play, barely surviving from fight to fight, desperately searching for the way out and a freaking save point.

On the plus side, I made it out and was levelled up quite substantially. On the downside, I got to bed much later than planned and I got bored of the game not long after. Still haven't been bothered to finish it.

[Wes]

Originally Posted by Peanut

I think I'm done with RE. On two separate occasions, on the way to a typewriter, I've been waylaid by two hunters in a hallway and killed, losing progress through almost the entire residence/aqua ring area, past the fight with Plant 42, which I repeated, and then again through a lot of the post residence stuff in the mansion. ...

Save points are the biggest piece of sh*t design still around in games. Die, please!

Haha, now you're bringing back memories! Though I think it was done in RE partly to heighten the tension of the game -- if you hadn't saved in a while (or hadn't saved at all, if you were trying to go for some of the higher grades/rewards), things seemed even scarier than they might've if you'd just saved. With the save anywhere feature in Primal (and in RE1-3, when I played them on the computer via ePSXe), my heart rate never quite got up to where it did back in the old days.

DOS emulators don't have savestates yet, though, so you can always break those out for some old-school fear! Or break them out anyway, because old games are cool.

Right now? I'm playing TMNT: Manhattan Missions. As always.

[愛]

I just started up Mario & Luigi RPG 3. I played for about half an hour, and the story is already pretty ridiculous. Apparently some dude is selling mushrooms that make people huge and roll around destroying stuff. Of course, it's up to our dynamic duo to save the Mushroom Kingdom. Uh, what?

[ThirdMarioBro]

Does it bring back that fruity fanboy humor from the first game? I found the script from M&L2 disappointing.

[愛]

Well, it's kind of in Japanese, so the jokes are a little different from the American versions. The dialog is pretty funny, though.

Been playing Wayne's World for SNES lately out of boredom, and finally beat the game. SCHWING!
It's probably the tackiest game I've ever played. The promotional movie cut scenes were just plain bad and shameful. They made me wanna hurl.

I've lately been interested to try Moonwalker the Michael Jackson game for Genesis ever since I saw Angry Video game Nerd's review. I just need to find something that can play Genesis ROMs...

[ThirdMarioBro]

Oh man, that Nerd review was great. Gens Plus! is pretty good as far as Genny emulators go, and probably the best you'll find for PC. PicoDrive is better, but they only port that to mobile devices.

I might also point out that the Genesis version of Moonwalker is garbage really, but the arcade version is actually a ton of fun. Take a look.




As far as hard games go, I decided to sit down and beat The Lion King for SNES. Probably one of the cheapest, most poorly designed and difficult games I've ever played. Never could beat the second level when I was little, but decided to just knock it out to see if I could. It has such amazing production values for its time, but clearly Disney Interactive didn't know what in the hell they were doing when it came to game design.